


Lately, I've Been Thinking

by jouissant



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: A+ Parenting, Angst, Domestic, M/M, Parent-Child Relationship, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Relationship(s), Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Canon, Siblings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-08-14 17:06:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20195716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: At forty, Dick assumes his story is mostly written. A chance meeting on a train platform changes things.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to casualalligator for brainstorming this fic with me on Tumblr years ago and to interstellarity for the title, from _ Three Pathways to Get Anywhere (Except When There Is A Dead End)_ by Anna Kostreva.

Dick didn't know what drew his eye to the man on the train platform. His walk, maybe—that rolling lurch— or his profile, or the way he bore himself up against the raw day, the collar of his fine camel coat against his neck, his cheeks pink. He was at the newsstand buying a pack of cigarettes and an evening edition of the paper. Dick stopped dead, fellow commuters parting around him like water, and watched the man draw out his billfold and hand over some change. Having paid, he turned and tapped a cigarette out of the pack, the newspaper tucked lengthwise under his arm. He put the cigarette to his lips and lit it, and there in the five-o-clock gloaming, in the bloom of flame, Dick knew. For a moment his throat closed up, and he thought he'd stop breathing, pass out cold on the platform and be trampled.

Someone collided with him from behind. Dick was thrust forward and thrown off balance. The flurry of motion caught the man's eye and made him look up at Dick, who felt a rush of embarrassment that he should be seen like this, staggering and clumsy.

Lewis Nixon's eyes went wide. "Dick?"

Dick walked over. Nothing else for it, despite the fact that a very large part of him thought it best to turn tail and run. But he'd done that once, hadn't he. Suddenly he didn't seem to have gotten very far at all.

"Jesus, it's been—what's it been, nine years?

"I guess so," Dick said.

"Shit," said Nix. "Gotta be."

Nix wore the same look of wondrous bemusement he had back in a Nazi wine cellar almost fifteen years ago, and he was still about as babyfaced. Dick felt immediately predisposed to tenderness. No surprise, really; that had always been his problem when it came to Nix.

"What are you doing here?" 

"Oh, a little business," Nix said vaguely. "How about you, you live here now?"

"No, business for me, too. I'm back in Lancaster."

"That's good, huh? Close to the family."

"Something like that," said Dick.

Nix kept nodding, past the point of normalcy. Silence rose like smoke curling under a door, accumulating in the space between them.

"Say—"

"Do you—"

"You go," said Nix, shifting from foot to foot.

"I was going to ask when your train was," said Dick.

"I was going to ask if you had time for a cup of coffee."

Dick looked at his wristwatch. There was a train in seven minutes. If he made it he could be home for dinner. Across from him, Nix waited. His eyes were bright. Dick hadn't seen him in a very long time, but he hadn't seen that particular look in far longer.

"Sure I do," Dick said. 

Nix smiled, and Dick's heart thumped against his ribs.

They sat in the cramped little teashop inside the station proper. They ordered coffee and Nix pawed through the cold case for a couple of dry sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. "Probably won't kill us.” 

"Very reassuring," said Dick, sliding into a booth.

Nix sat across from him, their feet bumping beneath the table, and it was so like old times that Dick felt winded with the keen pain of it. Nix looked paler indoors. Maybe it was the light. Dick took his coffee black, but now he stirred in a quantity of sugar just for something to do with his hands.

"So," said Nix, "how's the family?"

"Oh, good," said Dick equivocally. "Dad's retired. Driving my mother crazy. He keeps threatening to start working on the house, fixing up everything he let go over the years. I think she's half terrified she'll wake up one morning and find him in the front yard with a bulldozer."

Nix laughed. "Ann?"

Dick took a long sip of coffee. "Working," he said. "Teaching, actually. Sixth grade."

"God love her. You couldn't pay me enough."

"Well, they're sure not paying her enough, I'll tell you that."

"She get married? Kids?" 

Dick shook his head. "Says she hasn't got time for her own family on top of everything else."

"How do you mean?"

"How do I mean what?"

"Everything else," Nix said. "What's everything else?"

"Just work. She's got her hands full, is all." 

He could have cursed. Trust Nix to notice that, find a frayed spot and pick it loose. Nix shrugged, seeming appeased by Dick's explanation. Dick picked up his coffee again. "How's your sister?" he asked.

"Oh, she's as wild as ever," Nix said airily. "Got hitched to some guy a couple of years back. French, if you can believe it. I think he might've been a queer. Anyway, didn't last. She moved back out to California to sun her broken heart. I, uh. It's been awhile since I talked to her, to tell the truth, but you know how it is."

Dick didn't—far from it, but he nodded anyway. Something struck him about Nix now; he seemed edgier than Dick remembered him, though he couldn't exactly lay claim to perfect recall where Nix was concerned. After they'd parted ways that was what Dick had spent the most time berating himself for. At last he'd decided it was the war, Nix all tangled up in it, in the strange wash of emotion that ran through Dick when he thought of everything that had happened with Nix right there beside him. 

Nix shook his head. "Real interesting couple of guys we are, huh? Run into each other after God knows how many years and all we've got to talk about is our sisters."

"Maybe we've got interesting sisters.”

"You’ve got a point," said Nix. "Blanche is a hell of a lot more interesting than I am." He sighed. Then he lit another cigarette, leaned back and regarded Dick.

"What?" Dick asked.

"Fine, I'll bite the bullet," Nix replied. He rolled his eyes theatrically. "How are you, Dick?" he asked presently. "How are you really?"

That was the moment to tell him. Dick knew it in his bones, just as he knew immediately that he wouldn't, that he could no sooner imagine the words passing his lips than the version of himself who had loved Nix so passionately and so unreservedly could have imagined this stilted conversation. If he'd sat with a younger version of himself in a booth just like this and told him everything that had happened, sworn its veracity on a whole stack of Bibles, he'd never have believed it. To expect Nix to believe it too seemed a very tall order.

"Great," Dick said. "Really." He made himself smile. Across the booth Nix looked faintly disappointed.

"And you? How are you, really?"

Nix shrugged. "Well, I'm right here," he said. "What do you think?"

"I think—I think you're not drinking," Dick said. Nix raised his eyebrows, as if surprised Dick would speak so baldly, but it was true. The creamer at Nix's elbow, the sugar cubes he dropped into his mug one after another—they were conspicuous by virtue of what they weren't. It was after five o'clock, which wasn't to say time had ever constrained Nix in the past, but Dick couldn't think of a time this late in the day when Nix hadn't had a drink in hand or up his sleeve or in the offing somewhere.

"That's astute of you," said Nix. He slid the spoon from out of his coffee and tapped it against the saucer, the sound chiming out like a bell.

"Have you…" Dick let the question hang. He didn't know quite how to phrase what he wanted to say.

"I've given it up."

"Really?"

"Don't sound so skeptical."

"I'm not," said Dick. "I just—gosh, Lew, that must've been…I mean…"

"It was hell," Nix said. "Let's just leave it at that." He took a long drag of his cigarette.

Dick nodded. "How long ago?" He meant _how long after I left_, and from the way Nix looked at him the real question hadn't been missed.

"Years, now," Nix said quietly. "Blanche found me a sanatorium upstate, checked me in to dry out. I got wheeled around by a pretty nurse with a blanket on my lap, so it wasn't all bad." He raised an eyebrow with perhaps thirty percent of the salaciousness Dick might have expected. He had his hand flat on the table, limp as a fish, and Dick wanted badly to cover it with his own.

"And now?"

"Oh, I want a drink every goddamn day of my life," said Nix. "But I don't have one. I suppose that's something."

"Of course it's something.”

"I'm glad you think so," said Nix. He sighed. "You know, I used to daydream about this. About telling you. I used to imagine bumping into you just like this. Isn't that funny?"

Dick didn't answer him. Outside the window the dark had come on already, and all of a sudden Dick was struck by the lateness of the hour. He should have been close to home by now.

"I'm proud of you," Dick said, because for all these years that was what he himself had imagined. Not entirely altruistically (in his most embarrassingly human heart of hearts, Nix was always prostrate and apologizing) but all the same.

Nix rolled his eyes. "Gosh, thanks," he said, but he was flushed a little in the cheeks, and he fidgeted with his teaspoon.

"I am," Dick said. "You look good, Lew.”

Nix shrugged. 

A thousand other questions on the tip of Dick's tongue, all so pressing now that he'd decided he ought to go. Are you in love? Are you married? So selfish, Dick thought, but the thoughts plucked sharply at him anyway. Nix wasn't wearing a ring. Dick had made a point of looking, and he felt sure he'd seen Nix cast a glance or two at his left hand. Dick's sandwich sat on its plate, crust growing drier by the minute. He must have bought a place in the city; Dick couldn't imagine him staying in Nixon by himself for long.

Nix gulped his coffee and dropped his napkin onto the table beside the saucer. Here it was, Dick thought: the departure. He remembered that when Nix wanted to leave someplace he always moved a little faster, his actions choppy as a windup toy set loose.

"Well," Dick said, for he remembered too that Nix liked to be given an out.

"I've kept you long enough," Nix said. He sounded a little hesitant, as though he thought that was what Dick had expected him to say. "You should probably be getting back, huh?"

"You too," Dick said. "I don't guess you want to spend the night in Philadelphia if you can help it."

"There are worse places. And it's not as if I've got anyone waiting up." 

He let that hang between them a moment. Dick said nothing, knowing full well that by saying nothing he was answering Nix's unspoken question as declaratively as if he'd laid it all out on the sticky tabletop in front of him.

Dick looked at his watch. He should go. In a moment he would go, stand up and walk out of the teashop and board his train. He would find a seat, preferably beside the window, and he would lean his head against the glass and close his eyes, having bid Nix goodnight with tragic politeness. 

Dick was a man who liked to know where he stood, liked to be sure of things, and though he could see quite clearly the way the next hour or so of his life would play out, what he didn't know was how precisely he'd feel about it. And when he was sitting in that window seat on the seven o'clock to Lancaster, when he had his eyes closed and felt the wide dark windowpane cool against his temple, he realized he still didn't know.

When they parted outside the teashop Nix had held his hat in his hand, his brows drawn together. Again his eyes had been bright, and Dick had wanted so badly then to tell him everything.

* * *

At home he let himself in. Ann was sitting in the kitchen grading papers, a cup of coffee at her elbow. She looked tired, and immediately he felt guilty for delaying his arrival, a guilt he'd known was coming but had chosen to forestall in his earlier upset over Nix.

"Hi," he said.

She smiled up at him and he felt worse. "Hi. How'd the interview go?"

"Oh," he said. He'd nearly forgotten. "Fine, I guess. They'll decide by the beginning of next week."

"That's good," she said. The slant of her look was tentative. "You're back late. Did you miss your train?"

"Sort of.”

"There's a plate for you there on the counter if you haven't eaten; just stick it in the toaster oven a minute or two. And how does one 'sort of' miss one's train?" She could be imperious; she always had been, but moreso now she'd had a taste of the front of a classroom.

Dick set his briefcase down next to the table and went to retrieve his dinner from the countertop. He peeked beneath the napkin. Meatloaf, with half a baked potato alongside, and a bunch of green beans he imagined had been a source of considerable strife earlier in the evening. He was too tired to bother with the toaster oven. He took a fork from the silverware drawer and sat beside her at the table.

"I missed it on purpose," he said. "I ran into an old friend at the station." 

"That's fine for the two of you, I suppose. Meanwhile, back at the ranch—"

"I know," he said quickly. "I'm sorry. I should've said I had to get home."

She sighed, smiling at him ruefully. "I'm teasing you," she said. "So go on, who was it? Must've been someone important to keep you out past curfew."

He rolled his eyes at her. "I'll have you know I made it with a good hour to spare," he said. "Ma would've been proud."

"I wouldn't know. My curfew was midnight in high school."

"Declining standards," said Dick, shaking his head. "That explains a lot."

She kicked him under the table. "Stop stalling and tell me who it was."

"I'm not stalling," he said, though of course he was. "It was Lew. Nixon."

Her eyes went wide. "No kidding! Geez, Dick, how long's it been since you last talked about him?"

Dick swallowed a dry bite of meatloaf. "I don’t know," he said vaguely. "A couple years, at least.”

“Longer," said Ann. "Wow. How is he?"

"Good. Really good, actually. You--you know he drank,” Dick said this apologetically. “He stopped, not too long after I moved away. It’s been good for him, I think. Looks as though he's really gotten himself together." It was so strange to talk about him this way, like a mutual acquaintance.

"That's wonderful," Ann said. "You know, you should call him up and see if he'd like to come for dinner sometime."

"He lives in New York, Ann."

(They'd run down to Lancaster for the weekend sometimes. Nix would swear the car was faster than the train, and he drove like he was trying to prove the point. Sometimes they'd pick Ann up from school in Nix's car; once he took them out of town and let her drive it along the backroads.)

"So? We've got a perfectly good sofa. I know, because I slept on it until you bothered to fix up the guest room for me."

("Don't tell your brother," Nix said, and Dick reached around from the back seat and pinched him. Ann laughed. She was a good driver, careful, and the car was so light on the asphalt as they soared up and down the hills Dick thought it would fly away.)

"That took a week," Dick said.

"More like two. It's a fine sofa, but maybe not for a fortnight. But it'll do for Lewis. Go on, call and ask him."

If he didn't think too hard about it, he could pretend it was as simple as all that. He envied her living in a world where it was. "I'm not sure that's a good idea," Dick said, casting an eye at the ceiling. "Speaking of…"

Ann nodded. She looked like she had more to say on the subject of Nix, but she let it go for the moment. "Leave it," she said, indicating his plate. "Go on upstairs. I've got to finish grading before bed anyway."

As he got to his feet he realized for the first time how tired he was. He could barely recall leaving the house this morning. It seemed impossible to think he'd had a whole day before Nix had veered into his path. He sighed. Ann looked up at him again, and again she looked as though she wanted to say something. Dick paused at her chair and leaned down to kiss her on the top of the head.

"Goodnight," he said. "And thanks."

She found his hand and squeezed it. "Goodnight, Dick."

He went up slowly, stepping over the creaky stair halfway up. The second floor hallway was cloaked in shadow, his own bedroom door shut, the doorway beside it half-open set aglow from within by the lamp left on as a nightlight. Quiet, he thought as he slipped inside.

In a twin bed set against the far wall his daughter slept on her back, limbs flung wide and mouth open like a fish. She had kicked off her quilt, and now he crossed the room to set it to rights again, tucking it up under her chin. She stirred and sighed in her sleep, and he sat carefully on the bed and watched her a moment. He still found, even six years on, that when he was apart from her he could sometimes forget she existed, so that coming home to her recalled the soft shock he'd felt holding her in his arms the very first time. Who is this, he remembered thinking, and is she really a person, and is she really mine?

Oh, she's yours all right, said a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Nix. Just look at that hair.

She moved again, and muttered something he couldn't make out. You'd better get out of here if you know what's good for you, he said to himself. He rose, and she curled immediately into the space he'd left. He turned the lamp off, but he left the door open.

* * *

In the days that followed Dick went on as usual. 

He woke up at a quarter to six and made a pot of coffee. He woke Susan up for school. Now she could dress herself the process could be either easier or more difficult, depending on the day, and often there was a shoe on the wrong foot, too many or too few layers for the weather. This winter her dislike of woollen tights was equaled only by her hatred of trousers, which had resulted in a few tearful mornings and Ann yelling at them from downstairs to hurry up, that they were all going to be late. He brushed Susan's hair; she was tenderheaded and would squirm in his lap before the mirror, his admonishments to be still amounting to little more than a stern hum with bobby pins between his teeth.

When she and Ann had gone he took the paper and ran through the want ads again and circled the ones he thought might take well to his dropping in. He was back at the electric company but he felt too old for it, as though somewhere along the line his efficacy had made the switch from body to mind only, so that his muscles seemed to fail him, his hands fumbled with tools and bits of wire the same way they did with Susan's hair.

"Do a French braid, Daddy," she said one morning—he couldn't, and he sent her straight downstairs to bother Ann about it instead, madder at himself than he should have been, more than he ever got about fuseboxes and faulty wiring.

They'd have hired him on at the main office in personnel, the same job he'd held in New Jersey. But they had a man already, they'd explained, a guy who seemed to know Dick had an eye on his job and doled out a flimsy schedule as if to say, try me. For now Dick was a foreman like his father had been, and though he felt bad about doing it he would think sometimes about his business classes, about the little notebook he used to keep to jot down ideas, the one he hadn't written in in months now, and he'd feel the same sore tug around his middle that he felt thinking of Lewis Nixon.

In the days that followed, Dick went on as usual. Then Nix called.

It was Friday night. Ann was out at the movies with a girlfriend, and Dick had just put Susan to bed. He'd gone back into the kitchen to start washing up, and had just put the last plate in the drying rack when the telephone rang. He wasn't thinking; he simply went over to the phone and answered. His hands were still wet, and he cradled the receiver between ear and shoulder.

“Hello?”

Nix coughed down the line. "I'm glad it's you," he said when he'd recovered. "Didn't want to have to ask for you."

"Oh," said Dick. "Well, not likely to be anyone else tonight." 

"No?"

"Is everything all right?" 

He wanted to ask how Nix had gotten his number, though of course it was in the phone book just like anyone's.

"Sure it is," said Nix. "Only I'm doing something crazy. Thought you might like to know about it. And before you ask, yes, I'm stone-cold sober." 

"What are you doing?" Dick asked. His neck was beginning to cramp. He wiped the last of the dishwater off on his trousers and took hold of the phone.

"I'm looking at train schedules," Nix said.

"From where to where?"

"Here to Lancaster. What're my odds of running into you in another train station?"

Dick sighed. There was that sore feeling in his belly again, only now it seemed to have migrated north, into his chest. "Nix—"

"You didn't have a ring on," Nix said.

"What?"

"The other day. You didn't have a ring on."

Dick splayed his hand flat before him. "No," he said. "I didn't. I don't."

"Just checking."

"It's been a long time.”

"Yeah.”

"Why are you calling now?"

He thought he could hear Nix shrug. "It was good to see you," Nix said. "I didn't like leaving, if you want to know the truth. I was sore about it; I've been sore about it all week. So I thought, look, maybe that's what civilized men do, they call up their old buddy and ask him to dinner and see if maybe they can't talk a little more often than once a decade. If he's amenable, that is."

"What if I had had a ring on?" 

He didn’t ask what was perhaps the more obvious question, the one he already knew the answer to: whether they really were civilized men, and whether Dick really was--had ever been--simply a buddy. 

"I don't know. Would you be more or less amenable? Don't answer that."

"I won't.” 

"But will you have dinner with me? Doesn't have to be in Lancaster. Come here if you like. We'll go to the Waldorf. It's a pit these days, but anyway."

"For old times' sake?"

"Sure."

Dick sighed. "Yes to dinner," he said. "But you'd better come here. I blabbed to Ann about running into you, and she said you should come over right off the bat. I think she'd take it personally if I turned around and went to see you in the city."

"Hmm. I guess we've got to keep the interesting sisters happy," Nix said, sounding pleased. "When?"

I don't think that's such a good idea, he heard himself say to Ann. "How's…oh, next Saturday? You can stay over if it gets too late."

"I can get a hotel room," Nix said.

"There's a sofa," Dick said quickly.

Nix laughed. "Oh, is there.”

"Ann says it's comfortable."

"Ann sleep on your sofa a lot?" Nix asked.

"Oh," Dick said, rambling cut short. He'd managed to forget somehow, in the space of five minutes' conversation, that Nix didn't know how he lived. It had been startlingly easy to do. "Ann lives here. It's a long story, but…look, before you come, there's something you should know."

"You've taken up with your sister?"

"Honestly, Nix."

"You led right into it," Nix said. "Anyway, sorry, sorry. Go on. Unburden yourself."

Dick sighed. "All right, but—"

"What is it?"

"Ann lives with me," Dick said again. "She helps me—helps us out. I've got a kid."

If Nix was shocked—which he must have been—he recovered with alacrity. "Do you?"

"Yeah," Dick said. "A little girl. She’s six."

"She got a mother?"

"Like I said, it's a long story."

"Sounds like my long story," said Nix. "Never thought the two of us would end up with that in common."

"Not exactly like that," Dick said. "But close enough, I guess."

"Well, hell, Dick."

"Still want that dinner?"

Nix huffed a laugh. "Shit, I'm just shocked you haven't got ten of 'em," he said. "And that you're interested in giving me the time of day, let alone inviting me over. Beggars can't exactly be choosers."

"You're begging now?" He'd begged before, once; the memory made Dick's throat tighten up.

"I'm asking nicely."

"I'd always give you the time of day," Dick said.

The words came out softer than he'd meant them to, and as soon as they had he realized that that hadn't always been strictly true, and that as likely as not Nix was thinking the very same thing.

Nix cleared his throat. "I've got a decent wristwatch, but thanks."

A vaguely uncomfortable silence fell. Over the line Dick could hear a scrabbling sound; he wondered what Nix was fidgeting with. He used to keep a pad and paper by the phone in Nixon and doodle on it while on a call, long loops and whorls and his name and sometimes Dick's name too.

"So," Dick said finally. "Next Saturday?"

"Sounds fine," said Nix. "What time?"

"Say five-thirty? You can meet Susan before she goes up to bed."

"Susan. That's pretty."

"It suits her," Dick said. He found himself smiling. 

"I'm sure it does. She’s six, huh? What's she like, dolls? Horses? Mine was always crazy for horses."

"Oh, horses, definitely," said Dick. "We read Black Beauty awhile back; that started it."

“Yeah, I don’t know what it is with horses,” Nix said. He sighed. “All right, Dick. I’ll leave you to it.” 

“Saturday?” 

“Saturday. Whatever Ann’s cooking anyway, hear me? Nothing special on my account.” 

“Hey, how do you know I’m not cooking?”

Nix snorted. “Yeah, right.” 

Dick laughed at that outright. “Goodnight, Lew,” he said. 

When he hung up the phone he stood still in the kitchen for a good ten minutes, his palms clammy, feeling as out of sorts and nervous as if Nix had announced he was coming over right away. Presently Dick forced himself into action; he dried the plates with a dish towel and stacked them in the hutch, he wiped the counters down. He shut the lights off, leaving the lamp in the front hallway on for Ann. He went upstairs and looked in on Susan, who was quiet, and then having stalled long enough he went into his bedroom and sat on the bed. 

He took his shoes off and set them side by side on the floor, the closet feeling just a shade too far in his present state. He felt at loose ends; felt as though he wanted to wring his hands, which was ridiculous and, frankly, unbecoming. But he was alone and could do what he liked. He’d been alone five years, though he wouldn’t have said that in that time he’d done much of anything just for like of it. Life at home sometimes reminded him of the Army, where even moments of pleasure had been underlain with obligation. He was used to it, mostly. It had been nice to forget it with Nix, just for a little while.


	2. Chapter 2

Susan twirled in the middle of the living room, holding a feather duster. “Why do we have to clean?” she asked. 

“We have to clean because a friend of mine is coming over,” said Dick from halfway under the sofa, where he was attempting to retrieve what looked like a dessicated apple core. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, it’s got peanut butter on it. You know you’re not supposed to eat in here.” 

He pulled the apple out and lobbed it into a garbage bag. 

“Aunt Ann said just this once,” Susan said. 

“Yeah, and how many times did she say that?” 

Susan ignored him, and ran the feather duster along the back of the sofa. 

“Try the coffee table,” said Dick, and she nodded sagely. 

The living room was nice enough--cozy, and with good light, though you wouldn’t know it on a day like today. The weather was wet, with sleet in the forecast. A bad travel day, and one that had kept Susan cooped up in the house long enough to drive them both stir-crazy. Finally he’d given up and enlisted her help, if only nominally. He might keep her occupied long enough to give the living room a decent once-over himself, and that was probably the most he could ask for. He hoped Nix was all right with slightly shabby, although the house in Nixon had always seemed a little down-at-heel in the manner of the very rich, as though its occupants had always had something more fashionable to do than clean. 

The front door slammed. “I’m back,” called Ann, who had gone to do the shopping. “Help me with the groceries, would you?” 

He frowned as he got to his feet, feeling dusty. He sneezed. 

“Bless you,” said Susan, who clattered into the kitchen after him. “Daddy, I said bless you.” 

“Thanks,” he said, resting his hand briefly on the crown of her head. This morning he’d tied her hair back with a length of ribbon, feeling unequipped to handle anything more complicated. 

“What are you making, again?” he asked Ann. 

“Pot roast.” 

Dick looked at his watch. “It’s almost three,” he said. “He’s coming at five-thirty. Doesn’t it have to simmer awhile?” 

Ann rolled her eyes at him. “The quicker you help me put away the groceries the quicker I can start cooking. Unless you’d like to take charge.” 

He sighed. “Sorry,” he said, taking out a packet he took to be the meat. He set it on the counter and surrounded it with its fellow ingredients: potatoes, carrots, parsnips. 

“If Susan helps me chop it’ll go faster,” said Ann. “You want to help, Susie?” 

“I’m helping Daddy clean,” Susan said, waving her feather duster. 

“You know, I think I can manage the living room alone,” said Dick. Thank you, he thought in Ann’s direction. 

Susan frowned at him. “Are you sure?” 

“Well, it won’t be easy. But I think it’ll be all right. Better give me your duster, though; I’ll need that for certain. And you’ll have to come and make an inspection before Mr. Nixon gets here. Okay?” 

“Okay,” she said solemnly. 

He looked at Ann. “She’s all yours.” 

“Thanks, I think,” Ann said. “All right, miss. Pull up a chair and let’s get going, shall we?” 

By five o’clock the house was filled hospitably with the smell of herbs and browning beef, and not for the first time Dick thanked God for his sister. He still remembered the look on her face the day she told him she was moving in, that he and Susan needed her help. He thought it a testament to his own state at the time that he hadn’t seen fit to argue. He went downstairs and hovered in the kitchen doorway, watching Ann stir the pot periodically. Upstairs Susan was playing in her room, having deemed the living room acceptable. 

“Smells good,” he said, and Ann looked up.

“It does, doesn’t it? Thanks.” She gave him a long look. “Are you nervous?” 

“What, about Nix coming? Of course not.” 

“Hmm. I don’t know. It’s been awhile,” she said, and for a moment he felt sure she knew just how long. 

“I’m not nervous,” he said, too quickly. 

She smiled at him but didn’t press. She wouldn’t; she’d let Dick come to her if he wanted to, the way she had after the war. That too seemed like a very long time ago. 

At five-thirty Dick was standing in the front hallway, checking his watch and wiping damp palms off on his trousers. He was wearing a wool sweater he thought Nix might have gotten him for a birthday years ago. He hadn’t remembered until now, when it seemed too late to change. At five-thirty-one the doorbell rang. Dick let Nix ring it twice. Then he took a deep breath and opened the door, letting in a great gust of cold air that hit him full in the face and shocked him out of his fretfulness. 

“Hi,” Nix said, sounding amused, as though he knew Dick had been waiting for him. 

“Hi,” Dick said. 

Nix was carrying a bouquet of daffodils in one hand and a wrapped present under the opposite arm. He had an overnight bag at his feet. He brandished the flowers at Dick. “These aren’t for you,” he said. 

“Gee, thanks,” Dick said, taking them anyway. They were arranged in a cone of pink paper that crackled under his fingers. “You coming in, or are you just going to hang around in the cold?” 

He stepped aside and let Nix pick up his bag and go into the house ahead of him. As he came past, Dick considered him. His face was rosy as it had been on the station platform in Philadelphia, cheeks stubbled, though on Nix that just meant he hadn’t shaved since morning. He was wearing the same expensive-looking camel coat he had on the other day, his scarf a rich navy draped around his neck just so. When he took his hat off his hair was longer than Dick remembered, mussed, his shoulders flecked here and there with blown snow. He was thicker, not more solid--for Nix had always had a stolidness about him that made him seem a larger man than he was--but softer, as though he’d been fed up the way mothers always seemed to want to do to their sons. 

“Let me take your coat,” Dick said, grabbing for it with his free hand. 

Nix shrugged out of the coat obligingly, and as he did he turned to look at Dick, face open the way it had been outside the teashop. He smiled. “Hey, thanks for this,” he said quietly. “For having me.” 

As if on cue there came a gallop across the landing overhead. They looked up and Nix smiled wider. 

“Is that--” 

Dick nodded. “Don’t thank me yet.” 

“God, you a father,” Nix said. “You know, I always had the feeling you would be one way or another. It was meant to happen.” 

Something about that statement rubbed Dick wrong, but he didn’t have a chance to consider precisely what it was, because Ann ducked out into the hallway at the same time Susan came down the stairs. 

“Is that him?” Ann asked. “Is that Lewis?” 

“Hi, Annie,” said Nix, and Ann squealed and leapt into his arms as though they were long-lost friends. Which they were, Dick guessed. In a manner of speaking. 

“Oh, just look at you,” she said, holding him at arm’s length. “You look great! Did you bring a bag? Did Dick tell you to stay the night? Go and put it in the living room. Sorry if it’s a mess, Dick cleaned because I had to cook.” 

“God knows I’d rather eat a meal you cooked and sleep in a room Dick cleaned than the other way around,” Nix said, catching Dick’s eye over his shoulder. “I brought you some flowers. Dick’s got ‘em, but don’t let him take any credit. And is this Susan?” 

Susan nodded. 

“Say hi,” said Dick. 

“Hi.” 

Her face was pink; she toed a line on the rug with her black patent slipper. She had on a fancy dress Dick’s mother got her for Christmas, a green tartan with puffy sleeves that went well with her hair. She’d insisted on wearing it, with bare legs and lacy white ankle socks because they were staying in the house.

Nix drew out the package he’d carried in with him, and Susan’s eyes lit up. That was it, thought Dick; any hope of polite intergenerational conversation had just been soundly dashed. 

“I brought you something,” Nix said. “I heard you like horses, so--” 

“Lew, that wasn’t necessary.” 

“Nonsense,” said Nix. Then, to Dick, his voice low and conspiratorial: “C’mon, your kid has to like me. That’s non-negotiable.” 

Ann shot Dick a look that he couldn’t decipher. He raised an eyebrow at her--what?--but she turned away. Susan weaved around the three adults like a puppy angling for a treat. 

“Dad, Dad, can I--” 

“Sure, sure,” Dick said, feeling harried. “Go on and open it.” 

Susan sat on the bottom stair and ripped the bow off, and Dick had the sudden mental image of Nix in a toy shop, having the gift wrapped. He wondered how long it had been since Nix had bought a kid a toy. He thought of him consulting a sales clerk--_Excuse me, I need something for a six-year-old_\--and felt abruptly seized with melancholy. 

He’d gotten her a toy horse, glossy black with a white mane and tail and a gilded saddle and bridle. She boggled at it and was more concerned with getting Ann to take her into the kitchen to open the box with a pair of scissors than she was about thanking Nix, which Dick noticed with no small amount of chagrin. But he couldn’t deny that watching Nix watch her stirred something in him, seeing his pleased look when she came back out into the hallway brandishing her prize. 

“Linda has this one,” she said. “His name is Smokey and he lives in the Wild West with a cowgirl and he has a mare and a foal to match and--” 

“I think she likes it,” said Dick to Nix.

“Yeah? I didn’t know what to get.” 

“You didn’t need to get anything. But thanks. She’d probably give you a better thank you herself if she didn’t like it so much.” 

“I’ll put it down as a success.” 

Dick realized they were still hovering in front of the stairs. “Here, let me have your bag,” he said. “I’ll put it in the living room. Ann’s right, it’s a little messy.”

“It’s fine.” 

“Go on in the kitchen,” said Dick. “I’ll be in in a minute.” He took up Nix’s weekender--fine leather, monogrammed--and took it into the darkened living room. Outside the window snow had begun to fall again, glowing as it came down in the dying light. Dick put on a lamp. On review, he decided, the room wasn’t so bad. 

In the kitchen Nix was sitting at the table. Ann was standing over the pot roast laughing at something he’d said. 

“What?” Dick asked, and they both looked up at him. 

“Oh, we were just talking about the time the two of you came down and helped us move,” Ann said. “And Dad tried to give Lewis all those taxidermied birds from up in the attic. Remember?” 

Dick laughed. “Didn’t you end up with a deer head?” 

“Look, it was a ten-point buck, Dick. I couldn’t not take it.” 

“Where is that thing, anyway?” 

“I guess it migrated up to my attic in Jersey,” Nix said. “I couldn’t get rid of it either.” 

“The food’s done,” said Ann. “It’s getting on for dinner time for Susan, isn’t it? Are you two hungry now?” She leaned against the counter and regarded them, arms crossed over her chest, the wooden serving spoon she held brown and shiny with gravy.

“It’s up to you,” Dick said to Nix. “We can all eat, or I can feed Susan and we can wait until she’s gone up to bed. I know it’s early.” 

Nix rolled his eyes. “I’m in bed by nine these days drinking hot milk,” he said. “I think I’ll survive. Besides, if I’m here to meet her we might as well have dinner together.” 

Privately, Dick hoped Nix wasn’t staking the success of the evening on a six-year-old as a dining companion. Nix had told him once that they’d had a nursemaid the whole time his daughter was a baby, that she’d been brought in and out at intervals in a way that reminded Dick of a purebred dog at show, though his understanding was that Nix’s relationship with his dog had always been considerably warmer than with his daughter, or with Kathy for that matter. When Susan was very little and he felt unsure he sometimes found himself wondering what Nix would’ve done to calm her or to get her to sleep, and in his less charitable moments he decided the answer was not very much at all. But tonight Nix was here as a guest, and charity was the order of the day. 

Susan was decent at dinner. She poked at her meat and whined a little about her carrots and Nix told her he’d always loathed carrots as a kid, which made her laugh, and then Ann told a story she couldn’t possibly actually remember about Dick eating too many of them and turning orange, which made everyone laugh, Nix hardest of all. 

“To match your hair,” he said, wiping at his eyes. “That takes the cake, doesn’t it?” 

“That never happened,” Dick said to Ann. 

“Did so. Ma told me.” 

“Grandma told her,” said Susan gravely, and so Dick shrugged and acquiesced. 

After dinner there was a chocolate cake. Nix ate two-and-a-half pieces and sat back in his chair, both hands on his belly, groaning with pleasure. “That,” he said, “was delicious.” 

“You want coffee?” Dick asked. “I can make coffee.” 

“Oh, twist my arm,” Nix said. “I suppose I’ll have digested by the time it’s made.” 

Susan chose that moment to yawn. Ann smiled knowingly, and pulled her plate of half-eaten cake over to stack atop her own. “Tired, kid?” she asked, and Susan shook her head. 

“A likely story,” Dick said. He looked at Ann. “You wanna make the coffee? I’ll go and put her in the bath.” 

“Sure,” she said, and got up to put the plates in the sink. 

Dick was half expecting Nix to hang back in the kitchen with Ann, but he traipsed upstairs with Dick and Susan instead. She scrambled up with Dick behind her and Nix behind him, and Dick swore he could feel Nix’s eyes at the center of his back. In the master bedroom Nix sat on the bed and Dick took Susan next door and turned the water on. 

“You need help?” he asked her. 

“No,” she said. 

“How about your zipper?” 

She spun around so her back was to him, and he lifted her hair out of the way so her curls wouldn’t catch in the teeth. He unzipped her dress down to the waist and stepped back. “Okay?”

She nodded. “Okay. Can I have some bubbles?” 

He went over to the tub and squeezed a bottle of bubble bath into the water streaming from the faucet. Pink froth covered the surface of the water immediately, and the bathroom at once began to smell sweet as candy, with an underlying chemical edge. Dick wrinkled his nose. 

“Turn it off in a minute,” he said to Susan, who ducked past him and plunged into the foam. 

“Okay.” 

“I mean it,” he said. “Remember the other time.” 

“I’ll remember.” 

He shook his head and shut the door most of the way behind him. Then he went back into his bedroom and sat on the end of the bed next to Nix. 

“What happened the other time?” Nix asked. 

“Oh, she flooded the bathroom. It was my fault, I went downstairs too long.” 

“Huh,” said Nix. 

Silence fell between them. Nix looked around the room, not caring to hide his inspection. Belatedly Dick realized the intimacy of Nix in his bedroom. Susan wouldn’t think it strange; she was old enough to crave privacy sometimes without quite knowing why but too young to understand context. Ann might have noticed, but then Susan had pulled down enough walls between them that she might forget it was any less aboveboard to have two men in a bedroom than to have one man and his sister. 

He shook his head. What a life, he thought. 

“That’s nice,” Nix said, nodding at a painting above the bed. “That’s this house, isn’t it?” 

“Yeah,” Dick said. 

The house in winter, a view from across the street. The slate roof was rimed with ice, the maple in the front yard bare save a single cardinal, bold as a speck of blood. There was a pile of snow heaped alongside the walk, clean blue where the weak sun hit it but turned up and dirty at the base, as though it had been sitting for awhile.

“Who painted it?” 

“Susan’s mother,” Dick said. “Right before Susan was born. They made her stay in bed at the end, and she told me she’d go crazy if she couldn’t paint. So I brought up her easel and all her paints and brushes, and she painted the house.” 

“No kidding.” 

“Yeah.” 

I’ve got to go out and look at it, she’d said. He hadn’t wanted her to go out in the cold. I’ll tell you about the house, he said, and he sat on the end of the bed and described the house to her, over and over, the colors of the brick and the slope of the roof, the dormer in the attic with the broken windowpane. But he couldn’t get it right, and finally she shook her head and got up and went outside anyway, stared at the house for ten minutes and came back up and began to paint. 

He’d been angry with her. He thought she was being irresponsible. She’d gone out in her slippers and no coat and he’d followed her downstairs, stood in the doorway and watched her and been angry and said nothing. 

“I like the bird,” Nix said. 

“The bird’s my favorite part.” 

“Dick,” Nix said quietly. 

“I don’t think it was really there, though. I think she just put it in.” 

“What happened?” 

The bath was still running. Beyond the rush of the water he could hear Susan talking to herself. She liked to make up little games. She could play with anything: her fingers, the bottle of bubble bath. It amazed him. 

“Susie,” he called. “Turn the water off.” 

Nix was still looking at him. If he let the question lie, Dick knew Nix would look away, look at his hands or go over to the chest of drawers and pick up a picture he had of the company, a group shot in Austria, the last one of them all together. Above it, hung on the wall, was the map he’d refused to send back to Sobel. Alice had it framed for him. _Nuts!_ she wrote on the back in her loopy hand. She loved that story. She used tell it to her friends when she had them over for drinks. She started saying it to him when she thought he was being too much of a stiff. She’d stick out her tongue, and he’d grab her around the waist where she was ticklish. 

In a minute Nix would change the subject. He would never ask about her again. 

“She left,” Dick said.

Nix took a long time answering. He’d probably figured her for dead. Most people did, which Dick had begun to find grimly funny. “When?” Nix asked finally. 

“About five years ago.” He stood. “Susan, _turn the water off._”

He went into the bathroom. Susan was sitting with water up to her shoulders, sliding the soap dish down the sloped back of the bathtub. He sighed and turned the water off; she barely looked at him.

“Five minutes,” he said. “Then it’s time for bed.” 

“Can we read two stories?” 

“Maybe.” 

Nix stayed on the bed as Dick helped her out of the bath, towelled her off and got her into her nightgown and watched her brush her teeth. When he herded her into her room Nix got up too and followed cautiously, as though he thought he might be intruding. Dick read her _Make Way For Ducklings_, aware of Nix hovering at the door throughout. 

“Can we read it over?” she asked when they were finished. 

“You want to read this one again?” 

She nodded. “Can Mr. Nixon read?” 

“Let’s ask him,” said Dick. “Hey Lew, can you read?” 

Dick looked up at him. _Sorry_, he tried to say with his eyes, but Nix looked pleased.

“As a matter of fact, I can,” Nix said.

He stepped into the room carefully, looking around him as though for a tripwire. He pulled up one of the two chairs that went with Susan’s little tea table, painted white with a heart carved into the back. It was far too small, and Dick muffled a laugh behind his hand as he lowered himself into it, knees nearly around his ears. 

“Comfortable?” Dick asked. 

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” said Nix. He shifted around in the chair like he was settling in. “Where’d you find this, Susan? I think I need one for my parlor at home.” He said _parlor_ in an affected British accent, and Susan squealed with laughter.

“It’s too small for you,” she said. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nix said. “Now gimme.” He reached over and grabbed the book from Dick. “Ah,” he said, paging through it. “You know, I went to school in Boston for a little while.” 

“Did you see the ducks?” Susan asked. 

“Well, I saw ducks. Dunno if they were these ducks in particular.” 

“I think they were,” she said. 

“And who am I to argue with the expert? But look, I think we’d better get going, don’t you? I don’t think your dad can keep his eyes open much longer.” He flipped back to the beginning and began to read. 

She lay back against her pillow, and by the time he’d made it three-quarters of the way through Susan’s own eyes had closed. Nix shut the book and rose awkwardly from the miniature chair. 

“Christ,” he muttered. “My knees can’t take it. That’s how I know we’re old.” 

He crossed the room and slid the book back on the shelf and then they stole from the room, Dick looking back at her once before shutting the door, leaving it ajar. 

“She sleep okay?” Nix asked as they went downstairs. 

“Not bad. She was bad as a baby. She was colicky. We were up with her all night sometimes. But she’s fine now. Nightmares, but that’s it.” 

Nix looked back over his shoulder. “You still get nightmares?” 

Before Dick answered he thought of two things at once: Ann downstairs in the kitchen, sipping coffee and maybe listening. And the potent feel of the question, how it tugged at him the same way Nix on the bed had earlier. 

“Sometimes. Do you?” 

Nix stopped midway down the stairs; they were still high enough that the upstairs landing would conceal them from Ann’s angle of sight. He leaned back against the wall and gave Dick a long look. 

“Sometimes,” Dick said. He let the word gust out on a breath. 

“What do you dream about? The war?” 

Dick dreamed about the war. Not any place specifically; he dreamed about someplace that was nowhere in particular, about men who didn’t look like anyone he knew. But in the dreams he swore he knew them, and when they died it hurt the way it would if he did. 

“Not really,” Nix said. “Not unless it’s really cold out. Most of the time I dream about drinking.” 

“Really?” 

“It’s always the same. I dream I’m at an open bar, like at a wedding or a party. There’s no bartender, there’s just--bottles and glasses, and I’m filling up the glasses and I’m drinking and I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop.” He shook his head. “Those are bad to wake up from. I have to lie there forever until I convince myself it wasn’t real. I can taste it.” 

He looked down. Dick reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder, and Nix looked at it as though he didn’t recognize it. Then he sighed, slumping against the wall. He put his hand on top of Dick’s.

“I’m--” Dick started.

“Don’t say you’re proud again,” Nix snapped. “I did it for you, you know. You were long gone, but I still did it for you. What a sucker, huh?” 

“Lew--” 

But he’d brushed Dick’s hand off his shoulder and turned away already, jogging down the stairs. Dick followed, shaken, but in the kitchen Nix was grinning at Ann and accepting a cup of coffee as though nothing had happened. 

They sat back down at the table. Dick couldn’t look at either of them; he thought if he looked at Nix he’d demand further explanation, and if he looked at Ann he’d force her from the room so he and Nix could talk. Neither of these things was fair, just as it wasn’t fair he’d run into Nix at the station, it wasn’t fair of him to have Nix to dinner, or of Nix to accept the invitation, or to sit and read Susan a bedtime story as if it were nothing. It wasn’t fair of Nix to drink, or Dick to leave. 

Ann slid a cup of coffee across the table to him. He nodded at her, and she gave him the same measured look she had earlier. 

“So,” she said. “What are you up to these days, Lew?” 

“I wouldn’t know,” said Nix. “I’m not a businessman anymore. Never really was to start with, honestly. I was like a kid with a toy farm, huh, Dick?” 

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Dick said roughly. “I saw the numbers all those years. You had the place running in the black the whole time.” 

“Well, I had a solid staff,” said Nix. He sounded as grumpy about it as Dick felt, and it was unclear quite whether he meant it as a compliment. 

“You’ve still got the house?” Dick asked. “You talked about the house, before.” 

“Oh, sure. Blanche pitched a fit when I started talking about selling. I asked her when she planned to move in and start paying the property taxes and she told me where to go. So I’ve still got it. Drive by once or twice a year just to make sure it hasn’t burned down or something. They razed half the nitration works, you know. I guess plastics manufacturing gets by with a little more economy of scale now.” 

“Wow,” said Dick. “I’m--I’m sorry.” 

“Hell, don’t apologize to me. Selling that place paid for my apartment in the city and then some.” 

Dick shrugged. “It’s just strange to think about.” Some mornings he still woke up thinking he was going to work at the plant, going up to his little office on the second floor just down the hall from Nix’s. 

Nix looked at him. “Yeah, I guess it is, a little. After all those years.” 

“What do you do in the city?” Ann asked. 

“Oh, live the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed,” Nix said, stirring his coffee. “Mostly I read. I’m working through _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. Russian novelists. That sort of thing. Pretty dour.” 

He laughed. Dick had no doubt he was actually doing it. Nix could latch onto the strangest things and keep at them with terrier-like tenacity. Once he’d worked his way through the honest-to-goodness Oxford English Dictionary, spending a half hour every evening reading Dick interesting words. At the time Dick found it impossibly charming. 

Ann rolled her eyes. “Sounds awful,” she said. “What do you do for fun?” 

Nix shrugged. “Sometimes I go to the movies,” he said. “Or dancing, but now I’m off the sauce it’s less of a laugh.” 

He looked at Dick. Dick looked at the table and traced the woodgrain with a fingertip. He wondered at the impulse to be so glib, but then again maybe it was to be expected. Nix would rather fall on his own sword, if he could manage it. If you asked him he’d say he wanted to save people the trouble, but Dick thought he’d go a long way to have things on his terms. He’d been that way with his father most of all. 

“I’ve done some traveling,” Nix offered. “Went back to England, to France. I went to Hawaii and sat on the beach and drank things with umbrellas in them and climbed a volcano.” 

The volcano got Ann going. “You’re not serious,” she said. “Did you take pictures?” 

“Some,” Nix said. 

“You’ve got to come and show my class. We do a unit on geology, and I’ve got this project with baking soda and dish soap--” 

“Everyone does that in grade school,” said Dick. 

“I didn’t,” said Nix. 

“Yeah, but you went to grade school in Switzerland or someplace.” 

“Shut up,” Ann said, smacking Dick on the arm. “Don’t distract him. You’ve got to get your negatives made into slides, and then you can come and do a presentation. They’ll go wild for it.” 

Nix reddened. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked at Dick. “Can you see me in front of a classroom?” 

Dick could picture it surprisingly readily, and it only took a minute for him to realize why. “You got up and taught the whole company all sorts of things during the war,” he said. 

“See?” Ann said. “You’d be a natural. And besides, you wouldn’t have to teach anything, just...I don’t know, talk.” 

“Hmm.” Nix sounded noncommittal, and studied his coffee. 

“Think about it, anyway,” Ann said, as though Nix sitting here on a Friday night was perfectly normal, as though he might be here on any given night in the future. She was optimistic; she’d always thought Alice would come back, like a cat gone wandering. Optimism tired Dick out these days, and Nix had never really been one for silver linings. 

“I want a smoke,” Nix said. “I’m not offering, Ann; your brother will make me sleep on the porch.” 

“I don’t smoke, thanks,” said Ann primly. “And I’m getting tired. I think I’ll go to bed and read.” 

“I’ll come outside,” Dick said, and the three of them rose together. Dick gathered the coffee cups and put them in the sink. 

“Thanks for cooking,” he said to Ann, and bussed her on the cheek. Nix did likewise, and promised them breakfast in the morning. 

“I almost never burn the toast anymore,” he said. “Just you wait.” 

Dick and Nix put their coats on and went out onto the porch. Night had fallen, though the gloom of the day meant that it had only gotten darker by degrees. Snow was falling past the streetlamps, and their breath hung in clouds around their faces. Nix lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, exhaling with a groan of pleasure. 

“I love smoking,” he said. 

Dick wrinkled his nose. “I’ve never understood the appeal.” 

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t,” Nix said. “No offense.” 

“I’d have thought you might give it up too,” Dick said. 

“A man’s got to cling to his one remaining vice,” said Nix. “I’ve already given up booze. And women, for the most part.” He looked sideways at Dick. 

“Oh?” 

“Too much trouble.” Nix cleared his throat. “I, uh. I almost got married again. I took her on that trip to Hawaii.” 

“Oh,” Dick said. 

“Yeah, I don’t think Ann’s class ought to see my ex-fiancée in a bikini swimsuit with Diamond Head in the background.”

“When’d you go?” Dick asked. What he meant to ask was, when did you almost get married. The time frame mattered somehow; he wanted to measure it up against what he’d been doing.

“She hated me. I think she hated me the whole time.” 

“Lew--” 

“Bad news,” he went on. “So yeah, I swore ‘em off. Women, I mean.” 

The way he specified made Dick think Nix wanted him to ask about men. He was going to, and then abruptly he lost the desire. He’d felt full of ire since up on the stairs, and he hated it. There was no reason for it. If anyone had a right to anger it was Nix, and nothing Nix felt was any business of Dick’s anymore. 

He sighed and took his hands out of his pockets, stepped over to the porch rail and ran his palm along the length of it, dislodging the coat of new powder. The snow stuck to his fingers, and his skin began to ache with the cold. He went down the front steps and down the walk, and he expected Nix to call after him but he didn’t. He walked down the drive alongside the Plymouth, parked under a layer of frozen-over slush, and he stepped off the curb and went out into the middle of the street. 

The road was quiet; the whole town felt hushed, though he could see the lights on in the windows of the houses opposite. Five years ago he had come out onto the street like this, though it had been morning then, and a little later in the year. But even so the cold had been enough to make his hands hurt, to make Susan cry. He’d been holding her, having come downstairs too shocked to think better of it. 

He turned and looked back at the house. Nix’s cigarette glowed red as the cardinal in the painting upstairs. 

Nix did call out to him then. “How’s it look?” he asked, as though Dick was surveying. Dick didn’t know how to answer, so he shoved his hands back in his pockets and went back up onto the porch, and Nix stubbed his cigarette out and threw it away. 

“You ready to go in?” Dick asked him. 

Nix nodded. “Yeah.” 

Dick took him through to the living room, where he’d left Nix’s bag earlier. He’d folded a blanket at the end of the sofa and set a pillow on top. Nix sat down and picked it up, running his hand over the case. 

“Is this your pillow?” he asked. 

“I’ve got another one.” 

“I figured,” said Nix. “I just thought it was funny.” He patted the sofa beside him. “Take a load off, if you want to.” 

Dick looked at his watch. Still early; if he went up to bed he’d lie there tossing and turning and thinking of Nix downstairs anyway. He sat. He knew his posture was stiff, he knew he must seem strange, and he didn’t know what to say to counter it, or if it was possible to do so. Nix had his hands squared on his knees, but when Dick sat beside him he relaxed and leaned on the arm of the sofa. 

Dick nodded at the television. “We could--” 

“Sure,” said Nix, so Dick got up and put it on. 

They sat in silence awhile, Dick half-watching the western on the screen. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Nix watch it too, wondered if he watched the same program at home in New York. He was just beginning to think they’d gone too long without talking when Nix looked over at him. He smiled, the expression tentative in a way that reminded Dick of a very long time ago. 

He reached out and kicked at Dick’s shoe with his own. “Look at the two of us,” Nix said. “Sad, huh.” 

Dick could think of several things that were sad about the proceedings, but he didn’t know which of them Nix meant, so he just hummed noncommittally. 

Nix exhaled. “I’m sorry about earlier,” he said. “Upstairs. I shouldn’t have said what I said.” 

“Did you mean it?” 

“Sure,” Nix said.

“Really?” 

“Really. Not that I’d have admitted it at the time. I’d probably have said I did it for my family--” here he snorted--“or for the kid. Kathy wouldn’t let me see her, you know, until after I dried out.” 

Dick nodded. That, he remembered. 

“I was so angry,” Nix went on. “And for awhile it could’ve gone either way.” He shrugged. “In the end, this was the way it went.” 

“I’m glad,” said Dick. “Whatever the reason, I’m glad.” 

“Yeah, me too,” Nix said. “Even if a whiskey or ten would make things like this go down a lot easier.” 

“Hey, I’ve been dealing with you sober for years.” The retort bubbled up easily, reflexively, and it made Dick feel good again. 

Nix laughed and raised an eyebrow at him. “Well, you’ve had a nice long break.” 

“I guess.” 

Nix sighed and shook his head. “I missed you,” he said. “Sometimes I’d go a long time not thinking of you, and then out of the blue it would hit me, in the strangest places. I thought of you in Hawaii, for God’s sake. Standing on this balcony, looking out over the bay. It was like I could feel you there with me.” He laughed wryly. “Some other universe, maybe.” 

“Yeah,” Dick said. “Maybe.” Looking at Nix now there were so many things he wanted to say, things he’d imagined himself saying the way Nix had imagined running into him at the train station and showing off his new-found sobriety. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” was what he settled on. 

And he was--impossibly glad, all of a sudden. He’d never let himself think of Nix coming back into his life. It had seemed easier not to. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’d kept both his memories of them together and his imaginings of how Nix might live. 

Nix was looking at him. “What is it?” 

“Nothing.” 

Dick wanted to ask him if he was happy, but he was afraid if he did Nix would turn the question back on him in turn.

“I’m glad I’m here too,” Nix said. 

His face looked soft with fatigue, as though he could fall asleep on the sofa beside Dick, just like this. Dick wondered how it would be to let that happen, let Nix lean against him the way they always used to, carelessly, as if the other would always be there. Dick lay once with his head in Nix’s lap, a position he’d never been in before or since, and he’d nearly cried at the relief of it. He couldn’t imagine feeling that way again. 

“I’ll let you get some sleep,” Dick said. 

“It’s been a long day. And I can’t wait to try out this famous sofa.” Nix ran his hand appraisingly over its arm. 

“Take your time in the morning,” Dick said. “Susan’s an early riser, though.” 

Nix snorted. “Earlier than you?” 

“More intrusive.” 

Susan’s preferred wakeup call was a cannonball into the middle of a mattress, regardless of who was on it, or where. She was bony, coltish the way he’d been as a kid, and Dick had the bruises to prove it. He was frequently at the mercy of her knees and elbows. 

Nix smiled. He looked like he wanted to say something, but then he seemed to think better of it and shook his head instead, slowly, as if in disbelief. 

I know, Dick wanted to say. I know it’s strange. It’s strange for me too, every day, and I live with it.

* * *

To Dick’s surprise, Nix came stumbling into the kitchen shortly after he did the following morning, before either Ann or Susan had stirred. Outside it was still snowing, and the light came in blueish through the windows. Dick was making coffee, and when he heard the telltale creak behind him he knew who it was right away. Funny, he thought, how people carry a certain weight, move the same through space and time. How you learn them and don’t forget. 

“Brr,” said Nix, flexing his stockinged feet on the linoleum. 

He was wearing a heavy sweater the color of oatmeal, his scarf looped around his neck. His hair was sticking up at angles. Somehow the sight of Nix in the kitchen in Lancaster was frighteningly familiar, and Dick felt a sideways kind of shimmer, as though he might put a foot wrong and step straight into that other universe Nix had talked about last night. 

“I’ll turn up the thermostat,” Dick said.

Nix smiled at him. “Just pour me some coffee,” he said. “Keep my hands warm.” 

They sat at the table. Nix kept his hands pressed to his mug as though they might go elsewhere given the opportunity. “How did your business in Philadelphia go?” Nix asked. 

“Huh?” Dick had to think about it a minute. “Oh. It was a job interview, actually.” 

“You hear anything back?” 

“They called. They want me to come back out this week.” He made a face. 

“What’s that look for?” 

“Pay’s bad. It’s another foreman job, not--not what I was doing before. And I don’t much want to move to Philadelphia. Things have gotten a little light on the ground here lately. But something will turn up. It always does. In the meantime Edison brings in enough to keep us in coffee.” He took an illustrative sip. 

“And pot roast?” 

“With Ann’s help.” He looked past Nix in the direction of the back bedroom. 

“You still think about starting that business?” 

Dick shrugged. “That was a long time ago.” 

“Still,” said Nix. “It’s not as though you couldn’t--” 

“I don’t see how,” Dick said, more sharply than he meant to. 

Under the table he dug his fingernails hard into his right thigh. To match the sharpness, to chastise himself for it--either, or both. He thought about it. He thought about the way he didn’t think about it, how he’d go about his day doffing his cap to the personnel manager over at Edison, that slip of a man with a mean leer, and stoke the small fire within him that was still determined to tend itself one day only to come home and find it burned down to embers once more, his brain and hands too tired, Ann needing to be relieved, Susan needing dinner, a bath, an explanation, just--needing. 

“Anyway,” said Nix. 

“You want some more coffee?” 

“If you’re getting up.” 

Dick would, if only to stop trying to figure out whether or not Nix looked wounded. He stood up and went to the coffee pot, brought it back to the table and poured. 

“Thanks,” Nix said. 

“You know, you made a claim about breakfast,” said Dick. 

“Aha,” Nix said. “Should have known you wouldn’t let that slide.”

He was grinning again. He’d always liked to be essential, and while he wasn’t now--Dick could make toast and bacon with his eyes closed--the novelty had begun to feel that way. Both of them knew it, knew it could rescue the moment the way they both wanted. 

Nix shoved his chair back and stood. They were eye to eye now, and very close. He smelled like coffee. The sweater he wore was densely-cabled wool, and Dick was assaulted by a particular hallucination: the front of it under his hands, coffee taste in his mouth. 

“I’ll get everything out for you,” Dick said. 

The sounds of Nix attempting breakfast stirred the rest of the house. Dick had excused himself to shovel the walk, partially because he had to and partially because his emotions regarding Nix puttering around in his kitchen were mixed, and he decided he’d like the option of not having the recollection easy to hand. He worked up a decent sweat with the shovel, and came back into the house stripping his sweater off. He heard Susan right away; her sandpiper voice made him squint as into sunlight. When he came into the kitchen she was on tiptoes at the counter, Nix beside her with a mixing bowl. He and the countertop were smudged with flour. 

“She conned me into pancakes,” Nix said. “She’s supervising.” 

“Conned you how? Where’s Ann?” 

“In the bathtub,” Susan said. “She took her coffee.” 

Dick rolled his eyes just as Nix looked over his shoulder to meet them. 

“I think she was happy to take advantage of an extra grown-up,” Nix said, head listing to one side apologetically. “It’s fine,” he said, as if to preempt Dick’s disapproval. 

“Still,” Dick said. “She should’ve--Susie, go and put your clothes on.”

“After pancakes,” she said. 

“Susan,” Dick said warningly. 

“You heard the woman,” Nix said. “Sit. Have another cup of coffee.” 

Dick sat, but he made all sorts of noises and faces to show he wasn’t happy about it. By the time Nix had plated the first pancake he’d worked himself into a snit, aghast at Susan’s cheek, at Nix’s too, for that matter. He was standing at the counter with his sleeves shoved up past his elbows. He was frowning in concentration, and listening carefully to Susan instruct him on the best way to make a pancake look like Mickey Mouse. 

“So this is yours, huh?” he asked. 

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s my dad’s.” 

“It sure is,” Nix said. “You got any chocolate chips? We could give it eyes.” 

“Lew, no. No chocolate, it’s eight in the morning.” 

“Some people,” said Nix to Susan, “don’t know how to have a good time.” 

In the end Dick was saved from the looming threat of fun by Ann emerging from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her head. She was wearing a pair of dungarees that might’ve fit Dick and a large flannel buttondown shirt that certainly would. She stole the pancake right out from under him, just as he was contemplating its blank brown stare and wondering which ear he ought to dismember first. 

“Hey, that’s Daddy’s.” 

“Aw, I’m sorry, honey,” said Ann. She sunk her fork into Mickey’s right ear. “Go in the pantry and get me the syrup.” Susan knew when she was bested, and followed instructions.

“You want more coffee?” Dick asked Ann. 

“Sure,” she said. “You know, these are pretty good, Lew.” 

“Specialité du maison,” he said. He nodded at Dick. “You want another one?” 

“Make it normal,” Dick said. 

Eventually Nix had amassed a large enough stack to allow for sitting down himself, which he did, announcing that the cook ought to eat first, lamenting to Susan that it hardly ever happened that way. Dick watched him eat with what had always been his customary gusto. He seemed at ease this morning--whipping up the pancakes, joking with Ann and Susan. 

When the last pancake had been consumed Dick sent Susan upstairs to make good on her promise to dress. He stacked the plates, sticky with syrup, and filled the basin in the sink up with soapy water. He’d put his sweater back on but he shucked it again now, and the warm liquid against his skin made him sigh with pleasure even as it stung the places made tender by shoveling, the places he was no longer sufficiently calloused. 

There was a duplicate warmth alongside him. Nix with his sleeves rolled up, still. He plunged his hands into the water with Dick’s, one palm landing flat atop his. Dick froze. Their arms were touching, the furred dorsum of Nix’s wrist itchy against Dick’s skin. 

“Let me help,” Nix said softly. 

“You cooked.” 

“I made a mess in your kitchen.” 

Dick snatched his hand back, out from under Nix’s. He held it aloft as though he’d sprained it. “I’ll dry,” he said. 

Nix nodded acquiescently, and Dick picked up a dishtowel. They worked in silence for awhile, Dick’s gaze trained on each plate in turn. The plates were his mother’s old blue and white china, half a set boxed up and given over as a wedding gift. The two of you will need them soon enough, his mother said. Dick remembered wondering if she’d guessed, though Alice had been slim then, still capable of containing their secret. He ran his fingers around the circumference of one of the plates and picked at a gummy smear of syrup Nix hadn’t gotten off. The porcelain squeaked under his fingernail. Nix cleared his throat, and Dick looked at him sidelong through his eyelashes.

“What is it?” Dick asked. He sounded irritable to his own ears, as if still clinging to his righteous upset. 

“You’re very--” 

“What?” 

“I don’t know. Blanche was talking about you once and I remember her saying still waters run deep, and me thinking that was about the sum of it.” 

Dick never liked to think of people talking about him when he wasn’t there. Should’ve picked a different life, he said to himself sometimes, usually when the first grade room mothers stopped talking when he got in earshot. Alice’s friends, Nix’s family. Let me be, he used to think. 

“What’s your point?” he asked. 

“I can practically hear you sometimes, is all. Thinking. It’s worse now. Going over and over things.” 

“Maybe it’s the same. Maybe you’re not remembering right. You’ve had a nice long break, after all.” 

“Fair enough,” said Nix. 

The water must be tepid now. Under its surface Nix’s hands were moon-white. He let out a breath and drew the last plate from the basin. 

“Here,” Nix said, and handed Dick the plate. “I’ll pack up after this,” he said. “Let you get back to normal, huh?” 

Dick swallowed. “You want a paper? Check the train schedule?” 

“I wrote them down.” 

“You ought to call the station. The snow might have screwed things up.” 

Dick set the plate down on the drying rack. There was a droplet of water clinging to the edge and it ran down and around the well to the bottom lip to begin its slow journey onto the towel folded on the counter. He could stand here all day and watch it and think of nothing, he decided. 

Nix would be long gone.


	3. Chapter 3

He made it a day or so past Nix’s overnight stay without more than the most cursory discussion, which Dick should have known was too good to last. One morning Susan frowned into the mirror while she was brushing her teeth, spat into the sink and asked him why he’d never invited Mr. Nixon over before. 

“He’s your friend, isn’t he?” she asked. 

“Yes,” Dick said. 

“I invite Linda over all the time.” 

“That’s different,” Dick said. “Hey, did you tell Linda about your horse?” 

“She wants me to get the cowgirl so we can have a rodeo,” Susan said. “Can we go to Woolworth’s, and if we go to Woolworth’s can I get the cowgirl?” 

“Maybe for your birthday.” 

She sighed. “That’s a long time,” she said. She paused. “Can Mr. Nixon come for my birthday?” 

Her birthday was in March. Any number of things lay between now and then. Dick was gambling and some part of him knew it, but she was distractible and he wasn’t really listening. “Sure,” he said.

Ann came and sat beside him in the living room that same night, as though she and Susan had been conspiring. There were times he was sure they were, and there were times Susan reminded him more of his sister than she did her mother, for the years she’d known Ann had long outstripped the twelve short months she’d known Alice without really knowing her at all, in the nestling way an infant learns its parents. By now she would be nothing but sense memory, warmth and the smell of milk, mutable as fog. Dick was grateful for it, those nights he worried that Susan was ruined forever. And that was what Ann had told him once, sitting up late with her when she was sick, her skin hot and dry with fever, sprawled over their two bodies on the sofa. Dick was tired nearly to tears, the closest he thought his sister had come to seeing him cry. Ann wound a strand of Susan’s hair around her finger like a length of copper wire. 

“I feel so sorry for her,” Dick said, the maternal lack feeling particularly vast in the face of an ear infection, and several hours of screaming. 

“She won’t remember any of this,” Ann said. “You know that, don’t you?” 

He was beginning to realize this was no longer true. Tonight the questions about Nix only proved the point, and when he told Ann about them she shook her head slowly enough that he could tell she wasn’t surprised. 

“She asked me about him the other day, after school,” she said.

She had a drink in her hand, the rare finger of bourbon she allowed herself from time to time when she’d had what she termed _a day_. Today it was biology tests, or passing notes in class, or the kid who liked to stick chewing gum everywhere. 

“What did she ask about?” 

“Why she hasn’t met him before,” Ann said. 

“Mmm. That’s more or less what she asked me.” 

She took a sip of her drink and gave him a long look. “Then she asked if he knew her mother,” she said. 

Dick shrugged. “He didn’t, so that’s easy enough.” 

“That’s what I said.” She sighed. “Dick--” 

“What?” 

“I talked to Ma the other day.” 

“Uh oh.” 

Their mother considered herself a very permissive woman, though one who had been pushed to her limits by a so-far-unmarried daughter and a son whose wife had run off on him and left him alone with a child. That neither of these sets of circumstances were strictly anyone’s fault didn’t mean she failed to remind them. 

“She asked if you’d done anything fun lately,” Ann said. “I said yes, that you’d had your old friend Lewis over for dinner, and she smacked me on the arm and told me not to tease her. I told her if she wants to ask if you’re seeing anyone she ought to just come out and do it.” 

“I’m not,” he said. “Did you tell her that? I hope you told her that.” 

She gave him a sideways look, seeming at once innocent and dangerously incisive. Sometimes he swore she knew everything about him and was just waiting for him to catch up. “I told her it’s none of my business and to ask her yourself. Best of luck next time she calls.” 

“You’re a peach,” he said, and she grinned. 

“Aren’t I?” She bit her lip, and stared into her drink a moment. “While we’re on the subject,” she started, and Dick sighed preemptively. 

“I’m just wondering if you’ve thought about it.” 

“Honestly? No.” 

“Not even a little bit?” 

What he’d been thinking of wasn’t something he thought Ann could understand, so he shook his head again and said no. 

He hadn’t been thinking of the young widow from church whose friends gave him meaningful looks on Sundays, or of the woman whose little boy had pushed Susan over on the playground who was, by all accounts, a divorcee. He wondered what it was about the end of a marriage that made people so certain its component parts had been rendered suitable only for those equally damaged. When his mother talked about setting him up with some sad daughter of a friend of hers he felt like a car sold for scrap. Dinged up once or twice, but these things are worse than they look sometimes. Might very well have cracked the engine block.

“What about you?” he asked her. 

“Me?” 

“Turnabout is fair play.” 

“No,” Ann said. “Of course not.” And she looked away, and swirled the bourbon around the bottom of her glass.

* * *

He took the train to Philadelphia again for his second interview. It was rainy and on the platform he looked for Nix, though of course he wasn’t there, whatever business he’d had in the city having come and gone. 

Once Kathy had had a boyfriend in Philadelphia, had driven down to visit him often and as a result dropped her daughter off at the house in Nixon for a series of fraught weekends Dick remembered as equal parts raucous and terrifying. At first Nix was drunk and freewheeling, a favorite uncle, and Dick had hovered, unsure of his place, afraid to get his hands dirty and, he realized now, to risk being better at it. 

One night Nix took her into the yard and swung her around by the hands. They looked like a tilt-a-whirl in the dying light and Dick had watched from the porch, feeling sick with the burgeoning dread he felt most days then but hadn’t yet stopped ignoring. As he watched them the feeling softened, began to dissipate, but then something happened; she twisted wrong or got loose, she fell on her rear end in the grass and screamed, clutched her elbow to her body. 

Out of joint, the doctor said nonchalantly, when he made his house call. He popped it in again and she shrieked and the doctor gave her a sucker and patted Nix on the arm while Dick hid at the top of the stairs and listened. In bed later Nix cried. Dick had never seen him cry before. He asked Dick to leave him alone, so Dick went out of the room and stood again at the top of the stairs and waited until Nix fell asleep, and he remembered feeling utterly lost. 

He took a taxi to the company’s offices, which were in a sparkling building that cast the moody grey sky back along its whole height. He took the stairs a few flights up and then decided he was being foolish, would end up sweaty and out of sorts, and took the elevator the rest of the way. In the conference room he sat at a table and answered the same questions they always asked. He felt old. When he was younger he used to feel he could simply walk into a room and be assured he was the best man for the job, but now his suit felt itchy, his underarms damp. When he looked around the room his eyes settled on a young man in a blazer pressed more neatly than his. He wasn’t paying attention to what Dick was saying; perhaps his mind was on a girl or on Dick’s rumpled suit or the brassy gleam of his hair, which he knew struck some people as too memorable. 

“We’ll call you,” they said, which was what they’d said the last time. 

And they had called, Dick reminded himself as he took the stairs back down, so no sense in pessimism. There’d been another man in the lobby when he left the conference room and he’d given Dick an appraising look, but Dick wouldn’t think about him. Instead he walked away from the building until he found a park, a phone booth on the sidewalk beside it. He stared at it for a minute and then he sighed, stepped into the booth with a feeling of inevitability and fished a dime from the pocket of his overcoat. 

Nix picked up on the third ring. 

“What do you do when you think you’ve just blown a job interview?” Dick asked. 

“What’s a job interview? Is that where you sit on a log and talk your buddy into moving in with you?”

“Unfortunately not.” 

“Then I can’t help you,” Nix said. “But I’m pretty sure the answer to your question involves a stiff drink.” 

“You still can’t help me. What on earth are you good for, Lew?”

“Not a whole lot, as it turns out. Where are you?” 

“Philadelphia.” 

“God, again?” 

“Same place as last time.” 

“Where?” 

“I don’t know. Some park. Thought I’d take a walk or something.” 

“When’s your train?” 

“Any time,” Dick said. He was fiddling with the telephone cord, the wire woody and flexible as a vine. His mouth was dry, and he realized that he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink all day. At the interview they’d offered him coffee and he’d declined. They’d probably thought he was nervous.

“Go wait at the station,” Nix said. 

“Huh?” 

“Go on. The luncheonette. It’s still early, the sandwiches might be decent.” 

“What are you talking about?” Dick said. “You can’t just--” 

“Can’t I? I’m an eccentric millionaire, Dick. This is perfectly in character. Now go and buy yourself a newspaper. Or a paperback, come to think of it; I need to check the train schedule.” 

“You’re crazy.” 

“I’m getting my coat.” 

“Lew--” 

Dick got no further than the click of the receiver. He dropped the phone from his ear and held it in midair until he was roused by the buzz of the dial tone. He did buy a paper, and he had a novel tucked in his overcoat, something about spies he’d found on his seat on the last train ride, abandoned by its previous owner. It was the sort of book you could read with half your mind on something else, which was the only kind he’d been able to get through since the war.

Alice had been the type of reader who lost herself in it; Nix had too, for that matter. They’d both poked fun at him for his choice of reading material. He shook his head. He shouldn’t compare them. He’d always resisted it, and there was no reason to start now. But as he sat and pretended to read he couldn’t help but think that this was something she’d have done. He wondered if he’d be happier to see the crowd part for her along the platform, or to look out the foggy window of the luncheonette, catch a glimpse of that green coat she used to wear and feel the warm quickening of recognition.

Nix came inside in a blur of wool and stubble. He was smoking a cigarette, which he put out in the ashtray as soon as he sat down, wafting the residual smoke away. 

“Where’s my sandwich?” he asked. 

Dick rolled his eyes. “Take me somewhere better.” 

“Take you, huh.” 

“You’re the millionaire.” 

“Jesus,” said Nix. “I don’t remember you having such expensive taste.” 

They found a diner a couple of blocks from the station. From the formica and warped linoleum it was only a rung or two above the luncheonette, but they got a serviceable couple of sandwiches and cups of warm soup. There was a diner in Nixon they used to go to, back when Dick would have gone anywhere with Nix, and this reminded him of that place, with its stained menus and single irritable waitress. She glared at Nix for smoking and at last he put the cigarette out, which no past version of Nix would ever have done. But now he looked contrite, and the flush that came up in his cheeks made Dick laugh and made Nix stare at him and ask him what the hell his problem was. 

“Nothing,” Dick said. 

“You’re too cheerful. I guess you didn’t need rescuing after all. Could’ve saved myself the train fare.” 

“I told you you were crazy,” Dick said. “And anyway, I was all right. It was nothing, just an interview. And I might not have blown it.” 

“They’re probably working out how to try and afford you,” Nix said, sounding so sure of himself Dick felt bad for just how wrong he was. 

“We’ll see,” he said.

Nix leaned back in his chair and gave Dick a measured look, stared at him so long Dick had to fight the urge to tamp at his hair, to touch his face, certain of some stray lock or smear of dirt. He could never remember feeling self-conscious around Nix, but he did now, as though the years amassed between them gave Nix some vantage point he’d never had before, atop which he could examine Dick from previously unconsidered angles. 

“Tell me again about the business.” 

“What, the electric company?” 

“No,” Nix said. “Your business. The one in your notebook.” 

Dick groaned. “I told you before,” he said. “I haven’t thought about it in a long time.” 

“I always thought you’d make a go of it someday,” Nix said, resting his chin on the palm of his hand. 

“I thought a lot of things back then.” 

Nix snorted. “Look who’s a cynic,” he said. He grinned at Dick knowingly, as if pleased to see him demonstrate an unfavorable emotion. 

Dick worked his jaw, a familiar ache blossoming in the angle of his mandible. The business had been a fantasy. Even before Susan he’d felt the possibility begin to recede. And was only sensible, wasn’t it, to let things go if you couldn’t find a way to keep them? But then Alice had never thought that way, always dreaming with her expansive canvases, always urging him to dream too. Nix simply didn’t know better; men like him could barely form the crudest scaffolding of a dream before it was made manifest just like that. 

When Dick had come to New Jersey that first time, one raw night just after Christmas 1945, he remembered Nix opening the door and staring at him for a full minute as if in disbelief. It was as if he couldn’t reconcile the fantasy of Dick with the man on his front stoop in an old coat and hat and knit scarf, his nose running, cold and hungry and entirely, regrettably human. The trouble with Nix was his embarrassment of dreams come true. There never seemed to be enough space for them outside his head.

“It isn’t cynical to know when to call it a day,” Dick said. “It’s realistic.” 

“You tell yourself that a lot, do you?” 

“I’m a realistic person.” 

“Oh yeah?” 

Dick swallowed. “I think so.” Nix’s questions needled. Again he felt Nix was drawing some comparison, perhaps to some past version of Dick, and finding the current model wanting. 

“As long as you’re happy,” Nix said. 

“It doesn’t matter if I’m happy,” Dick snapped. “It matters whether or not I can keep the lights on.” 

Nix started as though he’d been slapped. “All right. Forget it.” 

They sat and ate quietly, Dick chastising himself for losing his temper. It wasn’t Nix’s fault, after all, that happiness had always been his primary concern. He’d told Dick once that the war had been the only important thing he’d ever had to do, that even in the worst of it there had been a part of him that could detach enough to experience it with a kind of literary thrill. Dick remembered thinking at the time that that sounded like something battalion staff would say, or worse, Dike, but he’d never have made the comparison to Nix’s face. But then Nix would never have dreamed of telling anyone but Dick that he’d managed to picture the carnage at Bastogne as the setting of some war novel, or at least Dick hoped he wouldn’t. 

The waitress came and asked if they wanted anything else, and Dick abashedly ordered a piece of pie a la mode. When it arrived he pushed it across the table towards Nix, who frowned but picked his fork back up anyway. 

“Apology accepted, I guess.” 

“I get it. You were only trying to help. But I’m not like you. I don’t have the means to pour a bunch of time and money into a pipe dream, and even if I did, I owe it to Susan not to upset things, and to Ann for that matter. I don’t know what I would have done without her, and that’s no exaggeration. I was a wreck before she moved in.” 

“You could never be a wreck.” 

“You didn’t see it.”

Dick traced the tip of his spoon through a puddle of melting ice cream. The truth was he’d been a wreck well before Susan had come along. One day he owed Nix the whole story, but today he felt too raw, too tender. The interview and the stress it stood for had been worse than he’d let on. Nix dropped his spoon and sat back, regarding Dick with a measured gaze. Dick felt sure then that Nix could see straight through him, see all the sore places, the places that had been throbbing for years. 

“Do you want to get out of here?” Nix asked. 

“That’s not a good idea.” 

“It’s never a good idea. That’s the point. But no, I just thought...we can’t talk here. Not really. It would be nice to sit and talk with you.” 

“You know a place?” 

Of course Nix knew a place. A nice hotel, where he swanned up to the desk and paid for a suite of rooms with a nonchalance that still managed to shock Dick, even now. He wondered what they must look like. He had often wondered that before. A couple of guys on business, maybe, but too easy with each other to be that, and far too different looking to be related. Maybe we’re partners, Nix had said once, like police detectives, and at the time Dick had thought that very funny. Now he thought the clerk must see them for precisely what they were--Dick loitering by a potted plant, trying not to look too eager for Nix to finish with the reservation--and simply not care.

Upstairs Dick felt the need to make some comment on the room, which was ostentatious. Nix ignored it and shucked his jacket and hat, which immediately made Dick nervous. I thought we were just going to talk, he wanted to say, aware it would make him seem prudish. But in truth he was afraid that once he got going he wouldn’t be able to stop. He had to stop, had to go back to the rest of his life. 

But not yet. Now he knew that when he’d gone into the phone booth after the interview this had been his endgame. They were in each other’s arms before Dick knew they were moving. 

“It’s been a long time,” said Nix, when neither of them knew how to fit together, but saying so seemed to break a spell, to make the touches and gestures seem familiar again. Nix still kissed fiendishly, and still palmed Dick’s cheek with a care that made Dick’s eyes sting. He expected Nix to ask him about other lovers, but once they were naked together he fell silent save a small pained noise he made, as though the sight of Dick’s body hurt him. He fell upon Dick and kissed him again, and in between kisses he murmured answers to questions Dick hadn’t asked. 

“I never,” he started. “Not with another guy. I couldn’t.” 

“Me either,” Dick replied automatically. 

He’d barely thought about sex at all in the years since Alice left. His body had felt divorced from him, wooden, nothing but a mechanism for keeping all the balls in the air. He wondered, not for the first time, if that was the feeling Alice had run from. 

He remembered her in that decrepit loft she rented, half-dried paintings propped against every surface. They made love in the afternoon in front of a wall of windows, her body pink and gold in the sunlight. He was shy and she told him it didn’t matter, that the only other people who lived here were the kind who didn’t care. The way she’d looked at him with the same singular focus she used on her work, and how he’d told her he was honored. 

“Dick?” 

He’d stilled, and Nix had noticed. 

“Can we slow down?” 

Nix sat up right away. “Sure. Hey, I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize. It’s just--it’s been a long time for me. With anyone.”

It felt like an admission of guilt. He could have blundered through anyway, but sex had never been that way for him, never been something he could approach without consideration. Nix had known that once, but maybe it was asking too much to imagine he’d remember now. 

Nix sighed. “Me too, if you want to know the truth.” 

“So you meant it when you said you swore off women.” And God help him, part of Dick had been pleased by that. 

“No, I meant it when I said I was in bed by nine with hot milk. My datebook was just collateral damage.” 

“You can meet women during the day,” Dick said dumbly, unsure exactly what point he was trying to argue. He got under the quilt. Nix’s legs were bare against his, the satin of the quilt cool atop his thighs. Dick felt decadent just being here, in bed in the middle of the afternoon. 

Nix leaned into him, set his head down on Dick’s shoulder. “I suppose. Maybe you could give me some tips.” 

“What?” 

“Don’t tell me you met Susan’s mother at an after-hours nightclub.” 

“No. I met her on the street. Wasn’t looking where I was going and walked straight into her.” 

His throat tightened at the memory, but he must’ve kept it out of his voice because Nix kept up his end of their banter as easily as if he was batting a shuttlecock. 

“Thank God you’ve got a few redeeming qualities to make up for that kind of introduction. So spill. How’d you do it? What charms the young ladies of Lancaster?” 

He chortled. Nix always laughed at his own jokes. Generally a pleasant sound, but it bothered Dick now. He shifted on the bed so that their knees were no longer touching. 

“It wasn’t in Lancaster,” Dick said without thinking. He winced. “Can we talk about something else?” 

“Where was it?” 

“Can we talk about something else?” 

“Sure we can. What’ve you got in mind? Stocks and bonds? The Dodgers moving to Los Angeles? I’m all ears.” Nix flopped against the pillows, head propped on a hand. His eyebrows had scooted up beyond his hairline.

Dick groaned. “I ought to be going.” 

“We just got here,” Nix said petulantly. “Look, whatever I keep doing to piss you off--” 

Dick ran a hand over his face and let himself slump beside Nix. It was strange how after everything it was still so easy to be close to him, even in moments that by rights shouldn’t have felt easy at all. He was reminded of the war, of all the times he’d felt as though between the two of them they’d managed to make some temporary transpository magic. He’d usually attributed that to Nix, and it seemed he’d been right to do so because now he thought about it Dick hadn’t felt that way in years. Not since he saw Nix off at Joigny in ‘45, probably. It felt so good to feel it again, and painful too, like fingers and toes thawing from bitter cold. 

“It isn’t you. I’m sorry,” Dick said. “Let’s start over.” 

Nix brushed his own hair out of his eyes. “All right.” He went still and closed his eyes. His mouth softened, and Dick was grateful for the way he knew to wait, to let Dick come to him. He kissed Nix gently on the lips, sat back and ran his thumb over the swell of them. 

Thinking back on it Dick could barely remember their first time. It had been bound up with so many other firsts, and it had been in some lull in the war when Dick had never been able to get all of his mind focused in one place, always half drilling or out on patrol or anticipating regiment’s next whim and who it could possibly get killed. By the time it had finally happened he felt as though he’d already had Nix inside of him in all the ways that mattered, and so the physical had been something of an afterthought. It had been hurried, as all their coupling was then; Dick remembered they’d gotten a pass and he’d worried that everyone would know what it meant, the two of them taking off on a pass together, although of course buddies did that all the time. 

“There was an air raid,” Nix said softly, and Dick knew that he’d been thinking of the same thing.

“Huh?” 

“Don’t you remember? There was an air raid right in the middle of it--I mean right in the middle of it--and I remember thinking, talk about a helluva way to die. And then I looked at you and you started laughing, really losing it. Remember? You made me laugh so hard I went soft, and then it turned out to be a false alarm, a friendly plane or something.” 

He was laughing again now, shaking softly, and his eyes were wet. Dick reached for him without thinking. 

“I’m an old sap,” Nix sniffed. “But God, that fucking war. I’d never have made it out alive if it wasn’t for you.” 

“That’s a nice thing to say.” 

Nix turned and stared at him for a long moment with an intensity Dick couldn’t remember seeing before. Dick looked back, aware that he had on a dumbfounded expression, but he couldn’t tell what Nix was getting at. 

“You always did give me too much credit,” Nix said finally. “I used to wonder about it all the time, about when you’d figure it out. You finally did. But maybe you’ve forgotten again.” 

Dick bit his lip. Nix was right, of course. Dick had often wondered if he’d known Nix’s faults going in and told himself that they didn’t matter, or if he’d been so blind to them for whatever reason--love, maybe, or a simple proud desire not to be wrong--that when they manifested in a way that was untenable to him he had genuinely been surprised. 

He wondered which was worse. Probably the former; after all, it involved a promise broken. They’d made each other all sorts of promises, and as it turned out Dick, not Nix, had been the one to break them. It was possible that Dick had been the one allowed too much credit, and he’d pressed at the idea like a bruise for years. Alice leaving had seemed to prove the point, and the pain of that had been delicious for how neatly it had matched Dick’s worst thoughts about himself. 

Nix went on. “I did need you then. And after. You were my true north, Dick. Maybe you still are.” 

Dick sat up, sputtering. This was too much. He ought to have known better, coming here with Nix. Calling Nix at all. He knew that back during the war, when things started between them, Nix had expected him to run from whatever he felt and not look back. He hadn’t, and in staying and seeing things through Dick had surprised not only Nix but himself. He’d been proud of it, felt much the same way he had about the army, about the simple decision not to be chickenshit, to stand up and look a battle in the face. 

But maybe he’d gone about it all wrong. Maybe Nix had always deserved more than just simple dauntlessness in the face of fear. Here in the hotel, grey afternoon light slanting in through a break in the curtain, Dick began to panic the way he hadn’t then, and in the red haze that ensued he decided he was too late to do anything but give Nix what he had expected in the first place. 

“I really do need to go,” he said, and this time he kicked the covers off and groped around for his pants. Nix didn’t say anything, only watched him get himself together, eyes dark and knowing as ever.

“I’m sorry,” he said. But he said it over his shoulder, halfway out the door, and he couldn’t be certain Nix heard.


	4. Chapter 4

A week later, they told him he hadn’t gotten the job in Philadelphia. And that was fine, Dick told himself. He hadn’t wanted to move to Philadelphia anyway. He decided he would give himself a bit of a break from looking, pick it back up again in the spring. But a few weeks after that, Dick was called into the personnel manager’s office at Edison. His hours had dwindled even further, so it shouldn’t have been entirely shocking, but there was still a sensation of numb surprise as he watched the manager shift papers from pile to pile and fail to look at Dick as he mumbled something about cutbacks. 

“We’ll give you a couple of weeks’ pay,” he said. “You being a veteran--” 

Dick looked up sharply. 

“Of the company,” the man finished. 

Dick had developed a twitch in his right upper eyelid, which got worse when he was tired. It started up again now, as he contorted his face into something he hoped resembled a smile. He wished he could have saluted and been done with it. Weary as he’d grown of protocol there was a coldness to it that suited him better now. 

“Thank you, sir,” he said. 

As he left the office he forced himself to count out the steps to the door so that he wouldn’t turn back around and tell the man that in his shoes Dick had prided himself on always looking a fellow in the eye. 

He went home. For the first time in a long time, he went to bed alone in the middle of the day. He thought of all the times Nix had simply retreated in the early afternoon, usually because a hangover had become too much to bear. Thinking of Nix only made him feel worse, made him wonder what he might be doing now, if he was reading a book or out to lunch or watching a movie matinee. He resolved to stop thinking of Nix, given how things went the last time Dick had thought of him in a weak moment. 

After their meeting in Philadelphia he had half expected Nix to call, though of course he hadn’t. Before when they’d argued it had always been proximity that saved them, anger spinning itself out over the soft check of shoulders in a doorway or a wry sideways smile at some overheard joke. Without that closeness someone would have to take a leap, and loathe as Dick was to admit it, that person wasn’t Nix. He rolled over and groaned into his pillow, and then got up and went for a run. 

After he was laid off Dick didn’t exactly get up every morning pretending to go to work at Edison, but it was a near thing. He told himself what he’d told Nix, that minimizing the disruption to all their lives was for the best, but the truth was Susan didn’t notice much, and though Ann did she wouldn’t have said anything anyway, for she was used to leaving him alone unless he wanted to talk. So it was for his own selfish purposes that he continued on without acknowledgement, waking early and making lunches for the three of them, seeing them out the door when the weather was fine and dropping them off in the car when it was bad. During the day he would go and sit at an automat and drink coffee until his stomach got upset, staring at his notebook. 

He began cooking dinner in the evenings, would often have it on the table when Ann and Susan came in the door, prompting Ann to ask if a girl couldn’t have a little time with her pipe and slippers first. For all he’d tried to keep things level, they regarded Dick’s exploits in the kitchen with suspicion. 

“It’s not that I’m ungrateful, Dick,” Ann started, picking at her Salisbury steak. “It’s just--” 

“This is burned, Daddy,” said Susan. 

There was something about the tone of her voice, so baldly undiplomatic. It was a clean shot through him. He had wanted--what had he wanted? To contribute one damned thing. Dick rounded on her, at once so angry he was nearly blind. His vision narrowed to the shine of her hair, the roundness of her cheek. She was whole and perfect and had never known the possibility of being anything less. 

“You’ll eat it,” he said, unable to stop himself. 

She might only have been making an observation before, but now his command made her contrary. She tossed her head, a pony new to the bit. “I don’t like it,” she said. 

Before he knew what he was doing he had his hand around the back of her small head, holding her in place. She’d thrown her fork down and he picked it back up, loaded it with charred meat and a wad of mashed potato and fed it to her in a mockery of the way they’d fed her when she first learned to eat, Alice grinning in spite of herself, Dick cajoling: _here comes the airplane--_

Susan pressed her lips together so hard they went white. He couldn’t deliver the fork and left a smear of potato on her face. She squealed against her closed mouth, jerked herself away from him so hard she knocked her chair back away from the table. There was a long slow moment in which she pitched backwards, and Dick imagined her head smashing against the floor. But the chair righted itself, and everything went very still. She stared at him in shocked silence, and then her face crumpled and she began to cry. She fled the room, but not before giving him a look that brimmed not just with anger but with fear. 

His own anger evaporated. In its wake he felt quite close to crying himself. 

“Well, that made a lot of sense,” Ann said, when the room was quiet again. “I don’t know what your problem is. I really don’t.” 

Her anger was almost a relief. “Ann--” 

“No. You’ve been walking around this house like a ghost for years, Dick. Years! You act as if you’re totally inscrutable. But you aren’t. You’ve got me, you’ve got--people who understand, or who could try to understand if you’d let them. And you’ve got a daughter, for Pete’s sake. And I’m sorry that things haven’t worked out the way you wanted, but she isn’t going away, and it isn’t fair to take it out on her.” 

“I know,” Dick said, chastened. “I know.” 

Ann had shoved her plate aside and was leaning on her elbows now, staring at him as though she could press him into some kind of action with the force of her gaze alone. 

“Do you know that the happiest I’ve seen you in the last five years was the night Lewis Nixon came to stay?” 

Her words rang out in the silent kitchen. He froze. He was certain that she was accusing him of something, and that now the two of them were standing on a precipice. If he said the wrong thing he would hurl them both off into the depths below. 

“That’s not true,” he said at last. 

Ann snorted. “You can tell yourself whatever you like. I don’t care. But you’d better find a way to be happy, or at least to pretend to be. Because if you’re not careful, she’ll realize you aren’t, and she’ll get it into her head that she’s the reason.” 

He couldn’t make himself reply. He got up, picked up her plate and Susan’s, balanced his in the crook of his arm. He wanted to throw them across the dining room, but the fact that he didn’t, that he carried them into the kitchen and scraped them into the garbage gave him the same cold comfort as his pained politeness in the personnel office at Edison. Ann waited at the table for awhile, perhaps expecting him to come back in, but he stayed in the kitchen and washed the dishes until at last he heard her get up and leave the room. 

He went outside to find her sitting at the top of the stairs outside Susan’s room, looking glum. “She’s asleep,” Ann said. “I sat with her a bit. I told her you were sorry.” 

He peered into her room. Susan was curled on her side facing away from them. “Thank you,” he said to Ann. He laid a hand on her thin shoulder, but she shook free. 

“Just figure it out,” she said.

* * *

“Here’s another one,” Dick said. They were sitting in the living room, Dick on the couch and Susan cross-legged on the floor. Dick was addressing invitations to Susan’s birthday party, and Susan was licking stamps. He wrote out his parents’ address, then their own, for Susan refused to accept that Ann didn’t need to be mailed an invitation. 

He watched her, the methodical way she moved. She tore the stamp from its roll, dabbed it on her tongue and set it in the upper right corner of the envelope, just askew. Her focus tugged at him, that simple desire she had to try and to keep trying. 

“Susie?” 

“Yes?” 

“Can I talk to you about something?” 

She didn’t look at him. She turned away altogether and took up a stack of envelopes to stamp preemptively. Oh, stop, he wanted to say, not wanting her to waste them. That was his first thought: correction. He didn’t think, even on the cusp of explaining himself, that he was the one who deserved to be corrected, that he--not Ann--should have apologized that night. Later he would justify it by deciding that his own father had never apologized to him for anything, though Dick had to strain to think of a time when he’d been wrong. 

“You know that sometimes grown ups make mistakes,” Dick said. “And I want you to know that I made a mistake the other night. All right?”

She was quiet a moment. She fiddled with the stamp she had just stuck onto the envelope. “All right,” she said. 

“Good,” Dick said, and brushed his palm over the crown of her head. 

“Here,” said Susan, presenting him with an envelope as though he hadn’t spoken at all. “This is for Mr. Nixon.” 

“I’m not sure...I’m not sure that Mr. Nixon will be able to make it.” 

She frowned. “He said he’d come.” 

“I don’t think he said that.” 

“He did. When we were making pancakes.” 

Dick was chewing on a fingernail, and now he ripped it to the quick. He sucked away a salty flush of blood, shook the hand as though dismissing the pain. He spat the rind of fingernail out onto the carpet, picked it back up again and obscured it in his hand. 

“The thing is, Mr. Nixon and I had a bit of a falling out.” 

“What’s that?” 

“A fight.” 

“You _hit_ him?” 

“Not a fight, then. An argument.” 

Only--had that been what it was? An argument was two-sided, and now that he thought about it he didn’t think Nix had said anything back to him at all. If he had, he’d probably just have told Dick he was being stupid. Told him to get over himself. But maybe he hadn’t. Maybe that was what the old Nix would have done, years ago. Maybe that was what Alice would have done, and Dick was becoming confused.

“When I had an argument with Linda you told me I had to make up with her.” 

“I did?” Dick was stalling now. It was funny how he thought he could get one over on her every time, and every time she showed him just how much of a fool he was. 

She presented the envelope again. “I want to invite Mr. Nixon.” 

“He might not be able to come.” 

Susan made a noise that sounded awfully like a dubious snort. “He isn’t fighting with me,” she said. 

In the end they sent the invitation out with the rest. After dropping it in the mailbox Dick resolved not to think about it any further. Nix would come to the party or he wouldn’t--Dick couldn’t imagine there would be much draw in a girl’s seventh birthday, particularly when one couldn’t get oneself through on the strength of liquid courage, which frankly was something Dick had considered at more than one childrens’ party. 

Accordingly, the morning of the party saw Dick in a state of quiet panic. There was rain in the forecast, of course, and as the hours crept on the house became shrill with children, all the wilder at being constrained. There were Susan’s classmates and their parents, there was Ann, who was being a sport, and there were Dick’s own parents, who somehow represented the nadir of the whole affair. 

Ann caught his elbow in the kitchen. “You ought to go and talk to them.” 

“I’ve talked to them.” 

“You said hello and then walked off in the opposite direction.” 

He was afraid to stand still long enough to hear his mother’s opinion on the proceedings, but he knew if he were to say this to Ann she would tell him to grow up and then he would probably tell her she was a hypocrite, because she disliked their mother’s meddling as much as he did. And the logical part of him, the part not addled by all this color and noise, said that there was really no reason Ann needed to be here at all, and that if he ticked her off she was liable to remind him of it by leaving. 

“I’ve got to go and pick up the cake,” he said instead. 

He was waylaid by a squall of tears from the living room, where someone had blundered into the wall while playing Pin The Tail On The Donkey. A bright blond mother held her boy’s bloody elbow at a right angle, asking after a Band-Aid, and by the time he’d fetched it there was a fight over who’d pinned the tail the closest, and by then he was overdue at the bakery. He was attempting to extricate himself from Susan, who had not won the game and was verging on dictatorial about it, when she suddenly wriggled free of him and gave a cry of excitement. She pointed at the doorway, which now reassembled itself around a familiar shape. 

“I told you he’d come,” she said, and flailed her small hand at Nix, who waved cautiously back. 

He nodded at Dick. In his other hand, he held a second wrapped package. Again Dick thought of Nix consulting the helpful salesgirl. He felt a rush of embarrassment. He followed Susan to the door, wading through a pack of children. 

Susan reached him first. Nix presented her with the gift. “Happy birthday, _mademoiselle._” 

“Thank you,” Susan said primly, lifting her chin at the endearment. “I’m not allowed to open my presents until after the party. I’ll go and put it with the rest of them.” She darted away. “Thank you for coming,” she called over her shoulder as she went. 

“Big turnout,” Nix said. “She’s really going to clean up.” 

“Rainy Saturday. They’re happy to let their kids wreck someone else’s living room.” 

Nix raised an eyebrow. Dick was reminded of their conversation in the diner, Nix’s glee at his cynicism. 

“Happy birthday to you too,” Nix said. 

“Yeah, right.” 

“I’m serious. I can’t say I remember my former mother-in-law all that fondly, but she did used to say a birthday party was just as much for the parents as the children. Another year you’ve both survived. So, happy birthday. I’d toast you if I had anything.” He waved his hands around as though to illustrate their emptiness.

“Thank you,” Dick said, and managed to mean it. 

“So what’s the schedule like for these things? Tell me I didn’t miss the cake.” 

“I was just going to pick it up from the bakery.” 

“I’ll come with you,” Nix said quickly. “It’ll alleviate the temptation to beat the pants off all these kids at party games.” 

Dick had looked forward to a respite from the party, but as soon as he was behind the wheel he regretted the decision to shut himself up with Nix in a small space. There seemed to be so much of him, and it was so familiar, the way he settled down into the passenger seat and spread himself out. He made no move to ask Dick about the hotel, or about anything at all. He cracked his window and lit a cigarette, and looked so content that if Dick hadn’t known what had passed between them just a couple of weeks ago he wouldn’t have suspected anything was the matter at all. 

At the bakery Nix claimed the sheet cake, holding it as carefully as a sleeping child while Dick fumbled with his billfold. “Put a couple of those on his tab too,” Nix said, nodding at a tray of chocolate chip cookies. Back in the car, he settled the cake in its white box onto his lap and ripped into his sack of cookies with great relish. 

“You want one of these?” he asked Dick. There was chocolate on his lips. 

“No thanks.” 

“Nobody tells you this about quitting drinking, but you pick up a hell of a sweet tooth. Of course I had one anyway, so it only got worse. C’mon, you sure you don’t want some?” 

He had broken off a piece of cookie and was holding it out, close to Dick’s face as though he meant to feed it to him. It reminded Dick of Susan at the dinner table, and the intimacy of it, the presumptiveness, made him sizzle with that same strange anger. He didn’t snap at Nix, though he could feel the words on his tongue, jagged and sour. Without thinking he flinched backwards away from the offering, the movement too violent to hide. 

Nix dropped his hand. He sat back and looked at Dick, barked out a single dry laugh. “You know, all of this is voluntary,” he said. 

“What do you mean?” 

“Me. Us--talking to each other. We aren’t in the army anymore. We don’t work together.” 

“It’s not like that.” 

“I’m just saying. I appreciated the invitation today. I had a nice time meeting your daughter, visiting with you and Ann. But you don’t have to tolerate a damn thing about me. We met up again a couple of times. That can be all.” 

Nix’s eyes narrowed. Not in anger, but in a calm survey. And perhaps this was the strangest part of all of it: how calm Nix was. He looked at Dick the way some greater class of being might watch a minor mortal struggle, knowing at any moment he could end it. Dick found himself unable to keep looking back, and began to scratch at a patch of something sticky that had made its way onto his steering wheel. 

"You know what I do with all my spare time in the city?” Nix asked finally. 

Dick felt fuzzy-headed, unsure where he was being led. “You read. You--go to the movies. I don’t know, Lew. We’ve got to get back.” 

Nix put up a hand to still him. 

“I go to meetings,” he said. “I go sit in dingy church basements with a bunch of other sad sacks who can’t handle their liquor. I’ve been to bunches of them. You want a map of AA rooms from the Bronx to the Battery? I’m your guy. Okay?” 

Dick nodded. 

“First time I went, I was just out of the sanatorium and I was lost, and pissed as hell, and I always said I wouldn’t do it but I was sick of myself, sick of sitting in my apartment by myself thinking about not drinking. So I went. I remember thinking it was bullshit. Still think a lot of it is bullshit, but someone told me that first time that I didn’t have to believe in it, I just had to do it. Which reminded me of something you would say.” 

Dick smiled in spite of himself. Nix paused, like he expected Dick to interject, but he didn’t. They had to go, they were due back, but now Nix was talking Dick had the idea that this was a kind of watershed, and that after it had passed, there was a very real possibility he would not see Nix again. 

“I did it,” Nix went on. “And I got good at doing it, and I got so good that now I help other people do it too.” 

“That’s all great, Lew.” 

“Yes, yes, you’re proud. I got it. Only--you’re still so goddamn angry with me.” 

“I’m not angry with you,” Dick said, but Nix just shook his head. 

“They tell us to make amends for all the shit we put people through.” He splayed his fingers to count off one by one. “I apologized to Blanche, but we’re the same person, practically, so I don’t know if it counts. I sent letters to Kathy and to my daughter. They didn’t write me back. I couldn’t apologize to my parents, because they’re dead. And then there wasn’t anyone else. Except for you. I could have said it any time. I looked you up back then just the same as I did a couple of months ago. I guess I was just too much of a coward.”

He paused here, took a breath so deep he might have sucked up all the air in the car. Dick felt a scrambling terror. Here it was, he thought. He was a fool to think after all of this he wouldn’t be faced with it at last. 

“Don’t,” Dick cried, before Nix could say anything. “Don’t apologize to me. I don’t deserve it.” 

“Dick--” 

“No,” he said. “Listen. I need to tell you something. I said it wasn’t in Lancaster, right?” 

“What?” 

“Where I met Susan’s mother. I didn’t meet her in Lancaster. I met her in New York.” 

Nix frowned. “When were you back in New York?” 

“I came back,” Dick said. “After they told me I didn’t have to go to Korea. I left from New York, so they sent me back where I came from. Nix, I came right back.” 

He remembered stepping off the bus in Times Square in his uniform, the city roaring back at once, surrounding him from sidewalk to sky like the walls of a canyon. It had become familiar to him, all those years in the city on weekends, on holidays, just because they felt like it. In the beginning it had been Nix dragging him--to Blanche’s apartment, out dancing, to awful family dinners made less awful by being together-- but by the end he had his own favorite places, his own haunts. He liked to go to the Met and walk through the cool and silent galleries. There were knolls and glades in the park that were hidden where he sometimes went to sit and think, where he sometimes asked Nix to go. They had their favorite cafes. And by the end he’d even learned to like the dancing, when they went to a place they could. Nix’s breath in his ear, heavy with whiskey. The shimmering dark, the heat of a full floor. 

But all of that was gone now. This was a city he didn’t know. 

Someone blundered into him from behind and cursed at him, and Dick hustled around a corner to a side street and leaned against the wall, breathing hard. All along he had intended to go to the station, take the train out to the house and surprise Nix, but thinking about it now he felt his throat begin to close. 

He had not left Nix well. Their final night together had been a disaster, Nix blind drunk at the diner in Nixon, sloshing whiskey all over the table. Dick had put him to bed and abandoned sleep himself, sitting up until dawn, kissing Nix on the cheek before leaving to catch his train. The trip west had passed quickly, the trip back even more so, Dick half believing he was in a dream. He spent most of the train ride staring out the window, wrung out by three months of army life, a buildup that had now been wrenched from under him. 

All that to say he hadn’t spoken to Nix since that last night. Dick couldn’t remember the last thing he said to him. A murmured endearment, probably, choked out against Nix’s fetid mouth. He couldn’t remember what it had been. He couldn’t remember meaning it. 

The Nix he’d have meant those words for was gone, he realized. He had been gone a long time. 

In the street Dick pressed himself against the rough wall of the building behind him, the brickwork scraping against the wool of his jacket. He told himself at first he would just go for a walk, would make a decision then. But the time he’d made his way a couple of blocks up 7th Avenue, cutting into an icy wind, he knew he had already decided. 

He’d written Nix a letter. It had been brief and to the point, vague enough Dick told himself he wasn’t lying. He told Nix that he wasn’t going to Korea, but that he also wasn’t coming back to New Jersey. He’d said something about his parents, probably, about needing to take some time away. He was sure he hadn’t mentioned Nix’s drinking, which had always seemed insurmountable, and also simply not Dick’s business. No, the drinking would have seeped between the lines, which he remembered as being businesslike save one at the end, a lone concession to feeling: _ I’m sorry to leave it this way, Lew, but I think it’s been awhile since either of us was happy. _

He wrote the letter in a crowded cafe, sitting at a table that wobbled on uneven legs. The encroaching patrons reminded him of Paris, and when he was finished writing he left, annoyed. He bought a cup of coffee to take with him, and as he stepped out into the street he was distracted and caught his foot in a fault line that cut across the sidewalk. He pitched forward, watched as though from outside his body as the paper coffee cup arced through the air and into the oncoming torso of a young woman with bright blond hair. She drew up short and glared at him. 

“Jesus Christ,” said Alice. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

* * *

As they drove back to the party, Dick felt both a sense of deflation and of grim success. For Nix was quiet now, no longer slouched into his seat but sitting upright, his upper body angled towards the window, staring as though the streets of Lancaster were suddenly immensely interesting. There was a masochistic part of Dick that felt pleased that, after all this time, his confession had had at least some of the dreaded effect. Of course his recounting the end of things had been no total surprise to Nix; he’d got the letter, after all, or at least Dick assumed he had, for there had been no reply. Listening to Dick talk now Nix had sat very still, though by the end of the story he had begun to nod as though a familiar song was playing. But the precise timeline, the fact that Dick had come back so quickly and stayed so close: this had always seemed to be the greatest betrayal, the most demonic detail. 

It had helped Dick to believe that his life with Nix was some fantasia he’d been drawn into, that if not for Nix he would have come home from Europe to that little farmhouse just the way he’d once imagined, that the only fork in the road had been the choice to stay with Nix, so that when Dick left he could tell himself it had been only the end of a diversion. 

The secret he’d lived with all this time, then, had been that this was a lie. That if there had been a fork, the road he left to take it no longer existed. If it had, he wouldn’t have wanted it. Nix had seen to that, and when he met Alice on that sidewalk in Manhattan Dick had had the nerve to be grateful for it. 

And all the while Nix mere miles away, roiling with drink, alone. 

He thought Nix might say something before they got out of the car, but as soon as he pulled up to the curb Nix just got out and went into the house, still carrying the cake. Dick trailed after him. He was in the kitchen accepting thanks from Dick’s mother, who was looking at the whole picture before her--Dick’s long-lost buddy back from who knows where, now arranging candles atop her granddaughter’s birthday cake--with an expression that was more familiar chagrin than surprise. 

“I still don’t know why you’d want to come all the way from New York City for a seven-year-old’s birthday party,” she said. She said _New York City_ as though it was the name of one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

“Who am I to turn down a personal invitation?” Nix replied. “Dick, do you want to light these in here, or what?” His voice was a sheen of oil floating atop everything that had happened.

“I’ll do it,” said his mother. “Susan was asking after you,” she said pointedly to Dick. “You’d better go in and get them all to sit down.” 

Dick knew an order when he heard one. He went into the living room. Before the party they had cleared the furniture and set up a series of borrowed card tables disguised with a floral cloth. Susan’s hoard of presents was clustered at one end. As he surveyed the room he felt a soft collision at his waist. He put a hand down onto Susan’s hair. 

“Hi, you.” There was a comfort in seeing her now. No matter what happened with Nix, no matter what happened in general, he would still have her. She would still need him. And there was happiness there, in whatever they might have just the two of them. 

“You’re finally back,” she said. “Is it time for the cake now?” 

“Mmm. Let’s round up your friends.” 

“Will you sit by me? I want you to sit by me.” 

“There’s no room for parents to sit. We’ll all just stand at the back of the room.” 

“Not all the parents. Just you,” she said, and slipped her sticky hand into his. 

His first instinct was to protest, but he stopped himself, thinking of the day they’d addressed the invitations. He was always surprised how much of fatherhood was simply directing his own guilt, encouraging it here and there like a shepherd. He let it lead him to a rickety wooden folding chair near the head of the table, where he let Susan perch on his knee to receive her cake, which was borne in by Nix in his shirtsleeves, Dick’s mother hovering beside him, candles dancing with flame. 

Dick kept his eyes on the candles as they sang but he imagined he had felt it when Nix slipped from the room, felt his heartbeat accelerate. Once Susan was preoccupied with cake and chattering with her schoolmates Dick slid out from under her. If Nix had left it was only what Dick deserved, but he couldn’t help but go looking anyway. 

He found Nix on the porch. He did have his coat on, but the way he was loitering, cigarette unlit, made Dick hopeful. Maybe it was pointless, he thought. Maybe he should just see Nix on his way, take up his offer for that to be that. A couple of meetings, a dinner, an ill-advised romp that couldn’t even be called sex. Didn’t amount to much, yet Ann had said it was the happiest she’d seen him. It was certainly the most excitement he’d had in years, which was enough to prompt a derisive snort. 

Nix raised his eyebrows. “What?” 

“Nothing. Here.” Dick brandished a paper plate. “Brought you this for the road. If you’re leaving, I mean.” 

“In a minute. I ought to be getting back.” He lit the cigarette, which Dick couldn’t help but see as the flip of an hourglass. Nix took the cake and set it beside him on the porch rail. “Thanks for this, though.” 

Dick didn’t miss the hint of wryness there, though he couldn’t reply anything but earnestly.  
“Thank you,” he said. “For helping, and for--” He shook his head. “You didn’t have to listen to all that back there. Me spilling my guts. I don’t see how it was supposed to help. It’s not as though it changes anything.” 

Nix looked at him with that same neutral expression. Like a buoy in a storm, perched atop the water. “Did it help you to say it?” 

Dick thought about it. He felt drained. He wasn’t given to fits of crying but he knew you were supposed to feel better after, lighter, and indeed some of the habitual tightness he’d grown used to around his chest had loosened. 

“Yes,” he said.

Nix smiled. He lowered his cigarette and shuffled closer. His hand found Dick’s wrist beneath the cuff of his sweater and he held it loosely, rubbing his thumb back and forth. Dick sighed out a breath and felt yet more tension bleed away, his body remembering how to be comfortable. Nix searched his face. Dick didn’t dare move, didn’t dare speak, lest this time he say something to break the spell and send Nix away for good. 

At last Nix opened his mouth, and for a moment Dick thought he was going to try and apologize again. “I forgive you,” he said instead. 

Dick ducked his head, a semiconscious evasion. Given time to assimilate the words he might have been tempted to run again, but there was nowhere to go. Nix was undeterred. He still had hold of Dick’s wrist. He leaned in and brushed his lips across Dick’s brow, so gently Dick might have imagined it. 

Dick could feel the whole house at his back. “Lew--” 

“Shh,” Nix said. “I know.” 

He let go of Dick, stepped back and hid his hand in his pocket. He took a long draw on the cigarette, and when he put it down his face was flushed. He rolled back on his heels. He looked self-satisfied, a look he always used to get when he knew he’d pleased Dick against Dick’s better judgement.

“Listen, you’ve got to come and see me in the city. I’ve got this idea, unless--did you get that job?” 

Dick had to think for a moment before he could place what Nix was talking about. “No,” he said. “I don’t have any job. I got laid off from Edison.” 

Nix looked momentarily shocked, but he swallowed it down. He seemed to be absorbing all Dick’s gloom, balling it up into some enormous store of energy. He was growing bigger with it by the second, the buoy again, the life raft. He must have done that all the time, Dick realized. During the war. How was it Dick had never noticed, never thanked him for it?

“Come up sometime. I’ll set a meeting. It’ll be good, you’ll see.” 

“What kind of meeting?” 

“You wanna keep seeing me? Or do you want me to--” Nix made an explosive hand gesture, like a bubble popping. He was far ahead now, his brain working over some stratagem. The question was one last check before he let himself go entirely. Do you want me to disappear? 

Dick felt as though he had grown so light he might leave the ground. Laughter rose up in him. It had to be Nix doing it. This alchemy. “No. Of course not. The--the second one, I mean. I don’t want you to.” 

“Good,” Nix said. “Good.” He took a last draught from the cigarette and tossed it off the porch into the mud. He took up his piece of cake, which Dick had covered with aluminum foil. “I’m going now.” 

“Okay,” Dick said. 

“I’ll call you.” 

“Okay.” 

“Tell Susan I had a wonderful time at her party. I hope she doesn’t already have that cowgirl.” 

Dick rolled his eyes. “You’ll spoil her.” 

“Somebody has to.” 

And how easy was it, then, to imagine Nix as a favorite uncle? As something more? He turned and jogged down the steps, stopping halfway down the walk to turn and look at Dick again. There was an ease to his movements that reminded Dick of when he’d first seen him back at OCS. All these years later he would never be able to remember the particulars, but what he wouldn’t ever forget was how seeing Nix had made him feel: that bright spark of curiosity. _Here is someone,_ Dick’s young brain seemed to say, _who deserves a closer look._

There was always something about Nix that made Dick want to keep looking. He had Nix’s forgiveness, and nothing else should matter. But Dick hoped Nix could understand, on the other side of his recovery, that that compulsion was why Dick had had to get away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dick's emo cake pickup was partially inspired by Don's in the first season of _Mad Men_. At least this time Susan got her cake. Plus nobody got drunk or bought a puppy, so there's that.


End file.
